The Road Not Taken: The Chamber of Secrets
by Marduk42
Summary: In a world separated from JK Rowling's by a single choice, Harry Potter finds danger at Hogwarts, and a mystery he never expected.
1. Back Again

The Road Not Taken: The Chamber of Secrets  
  
~*  
  
"Hello." The darkness of the dream echoed with the voice of a stranger. "Potter."  
  
"Where am I? What is this?"  
  
"A warning," the voice responded. "A spell, largely unknown, which allows me to speak to you while you sleep. And you'd better listen, because I've been waiting for hours for you to show up."  
  
"What? What's going on?"  
  
"If you're always this articulate while you're asleep, Potter, your dreams must be fascinating."  
  
"Wait a minute-you're-"  
  
"A friend." The voice cut him off sharply. "I can't warn you without catching the attention of some very dangerous people, and even this method has its dangers. Potter, you can't go back to school this year."  
  
"Why not?"  
  
"Something...very bad is happening. Soon, Hogwarts will be...dangerous. For you, for everyone. But especially you."  
  
"Why?" The voice chuckled, and Harry tried not to think about who it reminded him of.  
  
"Why? You tell me why, Potter! I know what really happened last year; other people do, too."  
  
"Wait-Volde-"  
  
"DON'T SAY HIS NAME!" There was a moment when a pale hand almost touched his, reaching from the darkness. "It's a dangerous name, Potter. Especially now."  
  
"So...is *He* doing something?"  
  
"No, Potter. The man you met last year is weak, near death. I can tell you...that old ghosts are awaking. Things that have not been seen for far too long...You cannot go back. Not now."  
  
"But what about my friends?"  
  
"You're the one in danger, Potter."  
  
"But if I'm in danger, so is Neville. I'm sorry, but I have to go."  
  
"Dammit, Potter! I didn't want to have to do this-" But Harry, feeling angry, *shoved* at his 'friend', feeling his mind press against the other's. But then the contact died, and the dream ended with a jolt.  
  
*~  
  
James Potter, certainly not as agile as he was when he was 13, nevertheless vaulted over a chair and an ottoman to reach his son's bed. The boy, screaming, barely noticed his father, even as the man wrapped his arms around him in a tight embrace.  
  
"Harry. Harry, I'm here. Your mother's down the hall. Harry!" Harry finally seemed to wake up at his father's voice; he glanced around, confused.  
  
"Dad," he gasped, returning the hug. "I...thanks."  
  
"Harry, what's wrong? What was...*that* about?" Harry suddenly loosened his grip and pulled away from his father a little.  
  
"I...it's nothing, Dad. It's just a bad dream, you know?"  
  
James gave his son a scrutinizing look, but then gave him a grin, even though Harry *knew* his father didn't believe that. "Okay, Harry. But get some sleep; we've got a big day tomorrow. Shopping, you know."  
  
"With Sirius and Remus, right?"  
  
"Yes, with the happy couple," James responded, making a mock-disgusted face. "If I didn't like those two so much, I'd kill them for being so...sweet." Harry grinned, and gave his father another hug. After James left the room, he sat in his bed for a few minutes, thinking. His father was so close to his friends...well, family. He was so close to the friends he had made at Hogwarts, and now that Harry was making his own friends...  
  
'If something were to happen to them...' Harry shivered. Of course he had to go back to Hogwarts. He had to protect his friends from whatever what was happening...and protect the person who'd risked himself to warn Harry.  
  
With those thoughts, he slipped back into sleep.  
  
*  
  
When Harry got to Flourish and Blott's the next day, he found a very exuberant Sirius Black waiting for him and his parents.  
  
"Oi! Harry! I've got wonderful news for you!" James strolled up behind his son, and smirked at his oldest friend.  
  
"From what I hear, it's more of good news for *you* than Harry..."  
  
"Hey, shut up, you git!" Sirius grinned and pulled his godson along into the bookstore. "Don't listen to that git, Harry. He doesn't know what he's talking about; he's forgotten how enriching it is to have Sirius Black in his life. Luckily, he will learn this year because he will be denied that pleasure." Harry frowned in concentration as he considered what his godfather meant.  
  
"Um...what do you mean?"  
  
"I've got a job at Hogwarts, Harry."  
  
"What?"  
  
"I wanted to come to Hogwarts with Remus. You know..." Sirius suddenly found the ground very interesting, and Harry couldn't blame him. From what he knew, spending time away from Remus had driven his godfather crazy; he was apparently embarrassed about what had happened.  
  
"So? Dumbledore'd let you-"  
  
"I didn't want to be hanging around the school doing nothing of use to anybody!" Sirius protested. His face suddenly melted into a smirk, and he added, "Well, nothing of use to *almost* anyone." Harry suddenly wished his mother had never told him about...well, the sort of thing that Sirius and Remus liked doing together. It put a lot of what Sirius said in a very...well, different perspective. Harry blushed and looked away as Sirius laughed. "Sorry, Harry. Couldn't help myself."  
  
"So what are you doing?" At that, Sirius' grin faded a little.  
  
"Well, Dumbledore told me that there were no open positions, but...well, he felt that there might be a position he would create that might come in handy." Sirius stopped walking, and Harry realized it was because the bookshop was actually very crowded. A crowd stood before them, and Harry suddenly realized that Sirius had stopped right behind Remus, who had a stack of books with him.  
  
"Ah, hello, Harry. I got your schoolbooks here. I thought you might want to worry more about Sirius than finding the right textbooks."  
  
"Liar," Sirius responded. "You just wanted a chance to browse the bookstore unhindered. I see that Charms book in there; and is that Mercury LaRousse's newest book?" Remus flushed, and he glanced away from his fiance. Sirius grinned at Remus and stepped close, giving him a light kiss on the cheek. "Ah, I don't mean it. I love your bookishness, Remie. I'll even treat, hmm?" Remus sighed, and nodded. "Don't look like that, Remus. I never get to buy you anything unless you can't get out of it." Remus, who had seemed to be working at looking self-suffering, gave Sirius a half smile, and then slipped his free hand around Sirius' waist.  
  
"Very well, Paddy. I will give into your wicked temptations. This time."  
  
Harry glanced between the two men, frowning. Now that he knew what went on between them (in far greater detail than he actually might *want* to know), he wondered how he had ever not noticed *something*. The way Sirius brown eyes were so genuinely happy when he looked at Remus, or the way that Remus always had a sparkle about him, especially in his golden eyes, when Sirius was around. He wondered briefly if he'd ever have something like that with someone. But at the moment, they were being embarrassing.  
  
"Sirius...do you need to be all...cuddly in here? And what's this line for?"  
  
"Goodness me, it's another fan! Oh, Mr. Lupin, may I say that I am a great fan of your papers; I feel that you are nearly as knowledgeable in the defense against the Dark Arts as I am. Oh, is this your son? Wonderful little lad, aren't you? Look just like your father." Harry didn't have the time to tell the blond, smiling man that while he *did* look just like his father, Remus wasn't it (and where *were* his parents? They'd probably decided he was fine alone with "the boys", as his mother called them). Because by then, the man had already continued on what was not so much a conversation as a monologue. "Well, I'm certain you've come to bring your son to meet me; is he going to Hogwarts? Well, then, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised to learn that I will be teaching Defense Against the Dark Arts this year. Of course, I was the natural choice for the position; Albus called me up one day, said, 'Gilderoy, we're in a bit of a spot. We need a Defense teacher, and we need one quickly. Of course, I wanted the best, so I thought of you. Please, Mr. Lockhart, tell me you're not going off to save the world from Dark wizards.' And although I had a number of very important appointments over the next year, I dropped them all, because as far as I'm concerned, there's nothing as important as educating the hope of the future. And there, little Lupin, I've signed your books. Remus, he looks like a bright lad-excuse me, do I know you?"  
  
Sirius, who looked like he was listening to a Banshee, suddenly glanced at Mr. Lockhart, who was dressed in baby egg-blue robes. "If you recall, I was hired by Albus Dumbledore to be your teaching assistant," Sirius ground out, his teeth clenched. "My name is Sirius Black?"  
  
"Ah, Sean!" Mr. Lockhart said, his face suddenly even more jovial. Sirius looked like he was seconds away from committing cold-hearted murder. "Yes, of course. Albus thought that this boy might make a fine teacher some day, but he's got a few problems. So Albus asked me to give him some tips, pointers, take him under my wing, as it were. Really, he seems a little dull, but I'll do my best. Well, you'd best run off. I'm sure you have lots to do." And as Mr. Lockhart pushed them aside, Harry caught sight of Neville several yards away, trying to clean up a huge stack of books.  
  
"Oh, Sirius-I'm going to see Neville..." Sirius nodded, and pointed to the front of the store. Harry would meet him there when he was done. Harry nodded in response, and then headed to Neville's side. Apparently, the round-faced boy had knocked over a stack of copies of "Magical Me", the newest book by Gilderoy Lockhart.  
  
"Hey, Neville. Having a bit of trouble?" Neville smiled a little helplessly.  
  
"Yeah." He stacked a few books in his arms, tried to move a few dozen copies of "Magical Me" back into their pile, and failed miserably in both regards.  
  
"Here, let me help," Harry said, and grabbed the books. They spent a few minutes picking up the mess, and Harry had just gotten Neville's last book off of the floor, when someone coughed. It was not the cough of someone who had something in his throat. It was the sound made only by the politest of people to indicate that yes, they are here, and yes, they have something to say, but wouldn't dream of interrupting anything to say so. Harry stood up, and came face-to-face with a man who radiated enough evil aura to actually dim the light in his immediate area.  
  
"Your friend seems to have dropped something," the man purred, handing Harry a copy of "The Standard Book of Spells, Grade 2". "Perhaps he would do well to keep a closer eye on his belongings." The man turned gracefully, or would have, had the entire contingent of Weasleys been approaching from his rear. With a shout, the man collided with an eleven- year-old girl, Ron's sister, Harry guessed, and fell to the floor. Books scattered everywhere.  
  
"IDIOT!" the man shouted, grabbing for the cane he had been using to support his gait. He pushed himself to his feet, but a gangly redheaded man was standing there, looking a little smug.  
  
"Hello, Lucius."  
  
"Arthur." The man's response was stiff and formal. "I'd love to stay and chat, except I have more...*important* things to do. I believe this belongs to you." He handed the young girl a battered book, and then glided away, giving the intense sensation of watching a snake leave his hunt.  
  
"Who...who was that?" Harry asked, glancing at the elder Weasley. The lanky man, looking slightly put-out, turned about to face Harry.  
  
"That was Lucius Malfoy. He's a thoroughly unpleasant fellow who, until recently, has been safely locked away where he couldn't dig his filthy hands into anyone else's business. In my opinion, he should still be surrounded by Dementors."  
  
"Arthur!" The stout woman Harry recognized as Molly Weasley hit him soundly in the back of the head. "Now, don't listen to him. You're not to talk that way about people, no matter how...unpleasant they may be. It's good to see you, Harry," she continued smoothly. "Now, I know your parents wouldn't send you out here all by yourself, especially not with...unsavory characters being around."  
  
"Oh, yeah," Harry responded, feeling embarrassed. Mrs. Weasley seemed to have decided to treat him like one of her own sons, and it was a little uncomfortable. "I...Sirius and Remus are meeting me up front." As Mrs. Weasley nodded and led her brood to the front of the store, Harry fell back to talk to his friend, Ron. The redhead had gained a little in height, and was still generally gangly, and wearing robes a little too short for him and a shade closer to gray than black.  
  
"Hey, Ron." Ron grinned shyly at Harry and led the way after his mother.  
  
"Hey Harry. Did you have a good summer?" Harry had to think about that for a moment. He'd tried to get his godfather to make up with his werewolf lover, learned more than he needed to know about sex, and been warned that going back to Hogwarts would be certain death.  
  
Harry suddenly realized how dumb he must look just standing there. He coughed nervously, and answered, "Yeah," and changed the subject. Ron was more than happy to talk about his own summer, and when he made an offhand comment about missing him, Harry realized that what with many of the distractions that summer, he hadn't gotten around to writing Ron.  
  
"And how's Professor Lupin? He was pretty out of it at the end of the year...did he and-is he all right?"  
  
"Yeah; I think he's in a better mood knowing Sirius is going to be at school this year-oops." Harry almost banged his head into a pile of rather frightening leather-bound books. Ron didn't know that Sirius and Remus were...involved, and given his mother's lecture, he supposed it wasn't exactly the sort of thing you told people right out. But Ron looked relieved at the news.  
  
"Oi, that's great. My mum's been worried sick about them. Ever since I heard the rumors about Snape-ugh! Now there's someone to punch him in the nose if he starts sniffing around Professor Lupin."  
  
"Wait...you *know*?" Harry demanded. "How-what-why?" Ron gave Harry a lopsided smile, almost embarrassed.  
  
"Well, my mum always calls them 'Sirius and Remus', never one or the other. And, er...it was sort of obvious, Harry. We didn't want to bring it up because if your parents didn't talk about it, or you-well, Hermione and I didn't know how you felt about...them." Ron refused to look at Harry as he spoke, focusing his gaze instead on his feet. "I mean...some people..." He paused, as if struggling for words.  
  
"It's just Sirius and Remus," Harry interrupted, a little confused. "I mean, yeah, it's a little gross when they get all emotional in public...it's like watching my parents kiss. Ech!" Ron nodded, smirking a little. It was an expression more at home on Draco Malfoy's face, but in a moment, it softened.  
  
"Hello, Molly. I see you've got your whole brood-oh, Harry!" Harry paused to look at his godfather; Sirius gave Harry and Ron a quick glance, and then gave Mrs. Weasley an easy-going grin. She narrowed her eyes in response.  
  
"All right, out with it, Black."  
  
"Molly, are you insinuating that *I* am up to something?" Sirius asked with exaggerated shock.  
  
"You're always up to something," Remus muttered, not without his own smile. "It's part of your charm." Sirius gave Remus a smile that must have been intended to be dashing. Harry thought he looked a little silly. He really hoped he never acted that way around anyone...at least on purpose.  
  
"Well, out with it, Sirius," Mrs. Weasley chided.  
  
"Ah, well, we're to meet James and Lily for lunch. They wouldn't mind extras. Would you like to come along?" Mrs. Weasley pressed her lips together a bit.  
  
"Sirius, we wouldn't like to impose-"  
  
"Ah, it's no trouble at all, Molly." Harry almost caught the flash of something like gold, and Mrs. Weasley's cheeks reddened.  
  
"Sirius, we don't need-" Mr. Weasley placed a hand on her arm, calming her, and Sirius whispered something, evidently trying to make amends. The plump woman calmed a bit, nodding. "All right. Come along, everyone. We're having lunch with the Potters."  
  
"Oh, shouldn't Neville...where is he?" Harry glanced around the store, but the other boy had vanished among the crowds. So he shrugged and followed the almost-parade of his friends and family out onto the street.  
  
*  
  
"Ron, what's wrong with your sister?" They had been at the restaurant for twenty minutes, and Ginny Weasley kept blushing whenever Harry looked in her general direction. And the way she kept looking at him...he couldn't help but feel that he'd seen that expression somewhere before, and aimed at *him*.  
  
"What? Oh, she's been mooning over you ever since she saw you at the station last year. Bit silly, really, that she thinks she loves you when she barely knows you. I guess she just figures it doesn't matter. Besides..." Ron trailed off, digging into his potatoes.  
  
"Besides what?" Harry asked. Ron only shrugged, and suddenly found his food very interesting. "Ron?"  
  
"Harry, I need the pepper," Remus interrupted. Obliging him, Harry tossed Remus the shaker, and when he turned back to Ron, the boy had apparently calmed himself and was blissfully oblivious to any questions in regard to his earlier statement. By the end of the meal, Harry was more than a little frustrated with his friend. He may have learned a lot over the summer, but he still felt like no one was telling him anything.  
  
*  
  
"Thanks, Mum!" Ron gave his mother a final hug before she stepped into the fireplace and shouted, 'The Burrow', vanishing in a flare of green. He then turned to grin at Harry. After much pleading, Ron had managed to convince his mother to let him stay at the Potter's house for the remaining week of holidays.  
  
The thought pleased Harry, mostly because he'd never really gotten a chance to be alone with Ron for most of the school year.  
  
"Come on, Harry, let's get my stuff up to your room." Ron grabbed Harry's hand and very nearly dragged him and his trunk up the stairs. He shoved Harry's room's door open, nearly hitting Sirius with it. He was standing next to a bed set with maroon sheets, in the process of slipping his wand into his pocket.  
  
"Hello, Harry, Ron," he said. "I was just making Ron a bed..." Harry thought he recognized hints of his mother's favorite chair, which Sirius seemed hell-bent on getting rid of, but didn't comment. Ron also looked like he wanted to say something, but cut off his own comment, as well. Sirius glanced between the two boys, an odd grin on his lips. "So, do you two want me to leave you...alone?"  
  
Ron flushed a hot red, and Harry, now actually in a position to understand most of what his godfather said, glared at him.  
  
"Sirius..."  
  
"All right, all right," he said, throwing his hands in the air. "Hmph. You try to help out a bit, and everyone starts getting in a huff."  
  
As Sirius wandered down the hall, Harry turned to Ron, whose face still a bright red; the other boy seemed to be trying to avoid looking directly at him.  
  
"Hey, Ron, it's okay. Sirius is always like that...I think. Are you all right?"  
  
Ron nodded vigorously.  
  
"Yeah, sure. I'm fine, Harry." He turned back, and although his cheeks were tinted red, he looked like he'd gotten over the majority of his embarrassment. "Er...why don't we play some chess?" He kicked open his trunk and started rooting around in it for the marble chess set Harry had given him the prior Christmas.  
  
"But I always lose."  
  
"No; I'll go easy on you, Harry."  
  
He didn't.  
  
*  
  
"Come on, Harry, you can go first." Harry nodded at his mother, and readied his cart. King's Cross Station was crowded, and so he had to pull this off in just the right way. He decided to do it at a run. Working up a turn of speed, Harry hurled himself and his luggage towards the wall between platforms 9 and 10.  
  
Five seconds later, his mother was helping him off of the ground, and the Muggles around them were glaring at him.  
  
"Terribly sorry," she said to passers-by. "He's just so rambunctious...ADD." The glares eased slightly at the flimsy explanation, and both of Harry's parents converged around him. Ron was left a few feet away, looking worried.  
  
"Does this mean Harry can't go back to school?"  
  
"Certainly not," Lily said. She glanced at Ron, thinking hard. "However...would you mind going on ahead? Your family's probably in there already, and I think you need to tell people what's going on. We're going to try and contact Dumbledore. Come along, Harry."  
  
And so the two boys were separated when Ron entered the magic passage to Platform Nine and Three-Quarters, and Harry was taken from the train station into a nearby wizard book shop.  
  
He knew that Ron would probably tell the others why he was held up, so he wasn't worried about them. When he saw his mother reach into the pocket where she kept her constant supply of Floo powder, however, he did get worried.  
  
"Pardon me," she said to the shopkeeper, a short, dumpy witch dressed in neon violet, "But we need to use your fireplace. Is that all right?"  
  
"No, let's not bother this nice woman, mum, huh? We can always take your broomstick, right? Please?"  
  
Lily shot Harry a glance he'd long ago come to understand as 'I know you're not going to like this, love, but it's for your own good, so you're going to suck it up like a man and do what needs to be done' look. "We need to get to Dumbledore quickly. Whatever blocked the doorway for you is powerful, and that means it may be dangerous."  
  
Harry stop babbling, a coldness settling in his chest. At the end of his first year at Hogwarts, Professor Dumbledore had revealed that some eleven years ago, Voldemort had caught wind of a prophecy of a child that would herald his defeat, one born "as the summer dies". He planned to destroy that child, but found there were two children who matched the prophecy's requirements. Harry had been one, and Neville Longbottom the other.  
  
So Voldemort decided to kill both, starting with what should be easy. However, he never left the Longbottom household. The Killing Curse, the dreaded spell that slaughtered thousands during the war, rebounded off of the child Neville and struck its caster. But events last year had proven that Voldemort was either a master at planning for all contingencies, or not enough of this world to truly die. And Dumbledore had revealed to Harry that his wand, a twin to the one wielded by the Dark Lord, marked him still as an equal, and thus, a target.  
  
It made his parents' concern a little more understandable.  
  
"Go ahead, Harry, you go first. The Three Broomsticks should do it; Dumbledore still doesn't like anybody entering the castle except by conventional means."  
  
Harry stepped into the fireplace at the back of the book shop, now flaming with green fire, and shouted, "The Three Broomsticks!" Or, at least, he tried to. It came out quite a bit garbled; Floo powder and its affiliated actions always made him nervous.  
  
There was the familiar sense of hurtling through very narrow space, and then he was ejected into a dark, dirty room. As he fell to the floor, he realized the room was not so much dirty as very, very messy. Furniture was smashed, and there were deep scratches on the wall. It looked like some animal had been locked up there, and had raged at the imprisonment.  
  
Harry carefully stood up, drawing his wand from his pocket. He felt nervous, as if he were walking into a graveyard. As he crossed the room, something caught his eye. An unusually bright spot in the darkness drew him. There, on the wall, was a small door that did not seem to lead outside. He pulled it open by the brass doorknob, the light which had caught his attention, and found himself looking into a long tunnel.  
  
With a streak of curiosity his father would have been proud of, Harry ducked into the tunnel and began walking. It didn't occur to him to wait in the room. First of all, there didn't seem to be any entrances, and secondly...the house was really very creepy.  
  
The tunnel, however, was simple. It was strong, dry, and well-kept. Walking along the path, something struck Harry. The tunnel wasn't dusty, and neither was the room. Someone had been using the area recently, and that meant that it was likely that someone would be at the other end of the path.  
  
Harry didn't know if that made him feel better or worse.  
  
It took a little while before he saw daylight...and heard the strange creaking noise. As he got close to the exit to the tunnel, he saw something fly past the opening, and heard a sharp 'crack', like a whip.  
  
He stumbled back, and almost ran into someone less than four feet tall.  
  
"Oh, I'm terribly sorry, Mr. Harry Potter," the high-pitched voice squeaked. "Dobby didn't mean to run into you."  
  
Harry turned slowly, hoping he wouldn't see what his mind insisted was there. A house-elf stood behind him, a small green creature that only came up to his navel. He was dressed in a tea-towel, and had a nervous, jumpy look about him, like a dog that had been kicked one too many times. House- elves had always made Harry slightly uncomfortable. He was always reminded of older Muggle movies, when black servants were always bowing and calling people 'master'.  
  
"Um...hello?' he ventured. The house-elf grinned, and then gave a short bow.  
  
"It is an honor to meet you, Harry Potter. Dobby has learned a great deal about you, and feels very honored to finally meet you."  
  
Harry looked at Dobby with an odd glance. Who in the world would tell a house-elf so much about him? He knew none of his friends lived in houses old enough to have house-elves; in fact-  
  
Dobby suddenly leapt up and grabbed the front of Harry's shirt. "Harry Potter must not to go back to Hogwarts. Turn around and never come back!" It was odd, to have a house-elf attempting to shake him; for one thing, Dobby's feet were barely on the ground. But Harry pulled away from Dobby, shaking his head.  
  
"You're ridiculous. Why shouldn't I go back to Hogwarts? All my friends are there..." But Dobby was shaking.  
  
"Oh, Harry Potter MUST not go back! Dobby knows he is in great danger...Master-" Dobby broke off, and unexpectedly began slamming his head into the wall. "Bad Dobby! BAD!" Startled, Harry pulled the house- elf away from the wall, leaving Dobby struggling against him.  
  
"Stop it! Dobby, what's going on here?"  
  
"Dobby should not be here," Dobby replied. "Dobby is not allowed outside without...Dobby means...Dobby is a good house-elf!" He pulled away from Harry, and stood before him, breathing hard. "Harry Potter should not go back to Hogwarts...it is dangerous." And with a sharp 'crack', he vanished.  
  
Harry was left staring at the empty space for a moment, flabbergasted. What sort of a creature could Disapparate this close to Hogwarts? Yes, one could Apparate into Hogsmeade, but the protective charms around the castle tended to leak into neighboring areas.  
  
Letting the subject drop, Harry stepped out of the tunnel and into daylight. The first thing he noticed was Hogwarts standing impressively to the north, only a short distance away. The second thing he noticed, nearly a moment too late, was the huge branch slicing towards his head.  
  
With a shout, he jumped out of the way, only to be caught by the edge of another set of branches that whipped across him, leaving a trail of scratches on his arms and chest.  
  
Laying on the ground, he got a good look at the huge willow tree, a strange species of growth that hovered at the edge of campus, routinely attempting to flatten anyone who got near it. Its branches were waving wildly, and behind him, others had already blocked off his escape. There was a moment of panic, and then he heard a number of people shouting, and, quite to his surprise, the tree froze.  
  
Then Lily was hugging him, and he heard his father and Sirius arguing about something, and behind them, a whispered conversation between Remus and Dumbledore.  
  
Harry stayed conscious long enough to realize he was safe, before he slipped into blackness.  
  
*  
  
"-Won't let you in if you were Albus Bloody Dumbledore! This boy got a nasty beating from that tree, and if I had my way, the whole plant would be on fire this very minute." Harry found it a comfort to wake to Madam Pomfrey threatening someone's life; it meant everything was going to be all right, if he ignored the portions of the near future when he would be forced to drink something vile.  
  
However, given that she was so worked up, the people in question were probably Ron and Hermione. Harry made an effort to call out, to let the nurse know he was all right, but his voice seemed to have gone. His neck seemed to be bruised, and it made him wonder how many injuries he hadn't noticed.  
  
And it made him wonder why there was a tunnel underneath the Whomping Willow.  
  
Then Madam Pomfrey returned to her domain, trailed by a very subdued Sirius. "Very well, Mr. Black. One minute. And then I'll send you packing...I remember the last time I left you unattended in here." And she vanished in a huff.  
  
Sirius grinned at Harry, looking a little embarrassed.  
  
"Hey, Harry." Harry tried to push himself up, but his arms seemed weak, and he had to settle for a seated position against the pillows in the bed. Sirius sat on the edge and leaned next to Harry, slinging a friendly arm over his shoulder. "Your parents are having a chat with Dumbledore, and it seems Lily's about ready to tear the old man a new one..." He chuckled. "And by the way, you should definitely thank Peter the next time you see him; he's the one who froze the tree."  
  
Harry nodded, considering. Peter Pettigrew usually was a slow-moving person, but when he grew anxious or particularly disturbed, he moved a lot faster, a bit like a rodent. He could imagine the paunchy man darting about under the tree looking for an opportunity to stun it.  
  
"Why is there a tunnel under there?" Harry asked, after a moment. "It seems like a stupid thing to do, putting a tunnel under a tree like that."  
  
"Not stupid, Harry," Sirius replied, "Cautious." He frowned for a moment, and then leaned close. "Poppy'll kill me for staying longer, but...that tunnel goes into Hogsmeade."  
  
"It goes to a big, boarded-up house," Harry said. "I know. I got lost in the Floo Network."  
  
Sirius snorted, smiling. "Yeah. I have a lot of great memories in that place."  
  
"Um...Sirius, it didn't look like a great place to spend the night or anything," Harry said. "It looked pretty trashy, to tell the truth."  
  
"Like a wild animal had torn everything to pieces?" Sirius asked. At Harry's nod, he squeezed his godson's shoulder a little tighter. "That is because that is the Shrieking Shack, the most haunted house in all of Britain. How about that?"  
  
"Haunted? But that didn't look like the sort of ghost I've seen before," Harry protested. "It looked more like..."  
  
"A werewolf," Sirius completed. "It's where Remus went during his school years...he still spends his time there, even though we've got everything under control."  
  
Harry had to shudder at the image that statement conjured. He wasn't afraid of Remus, but he could imagine the man stumbling past the tree, eyes fixated on the horizon...he could imagine Remus falling onto the wooden floor, clutching at his side as his skin began to ripple, could imagine a beast raging at the inside of the house, tearing everything, including himself, to shreds of their former selves...  
  
"Hey, Harry. It's all right...it's just Remus we're talking about." At Sirius' words and the more comforting hug he received, Harry understood Sirius had misunderstood his reaction.  
  
"I'm not scared," Harry replied. "I just wonder how he bears it."  
  
There was a quiet moment where Harry could actually feel Sirius smiling warmly. "He has people who help him through it."  
  
"But...to always weather the full moon alone..." Harry murmured, suddenly sleepy. Sirius slid him down into a prone position and stood up, leaving Harry alone in the hospital wing.  
  
And Harry dreamed.  
  
He didn't remember much about the voices in his memory, nor the content of the dream, but what he did remember was the voice that spoke as he slipped back into consciousness, one whispering in the walls.  
  
"He comesssss...he comes back for me...massster."  
  
"All right, Mr. Potter, you can join the others in the Great Hall," Madam Pomfrey muttered, stepping into the main room of the Infirmary. He glanced up at her, looking and feeling quite a bit frightened.  
  
"You didn't...you didn't hear anyone in here, did you?" he asked nervously.  
  
Madam Pomfrey tilted her head at him, lips pressed together in concentration. "No, I don't think so. You're the first casualty of the year. And I really hope I don't have to see you here again this year." She gave a long-suffering sigh, and then added, "Although, knowing your parents and your godfather, I can't expect that. Could I at least hope you won't be sending Slytherin students here in any regular frequency?"  
  
Harry paused, and a thought occurred to him. He reached under his robes to touch a small pendant that hung about his neck, a strange, hollow shield made of silver. He looked up at Madam Pomfrey and answered, sincerely, "Yes. I don't think it'll be a problem."  
  
*  
  
"Harry! Oh, you won't imagine the sorts of rumors that have gotten around. Dean Thomas has been telling people you were hexed and sent to St. Mungo's, Neville's convinced you were caught by Muggles and locked up in a lab somewhere, and I-"  
  
Ron slapped a hand over Hermione's mouth and gave Harry a wide grin. "I'm glad to see you're all right, mate, although it's horrible you left me alone with her trying to explain things."  
  
With a sharp slap, Hermione pushed Ron's hand away, and rolled her eyes. "Well, come on, sit down..." Harry followed her to take a seat, trying to ignore the stares of the Great Hall. Evidently, the word had gotten around he was missing, and seeing him there was either going to stop the gossiping or make it infinitely worse. He thought he knew which one it would be.  
  
"Have you talked to Dumbledore about it?" Hermione whispered at him as she took a seat to his left. "Because I'm sure he'd need to know about this sort of thing right away-"  
  
"Honestly, 'Mione, give him a chance to eat," Ron muttered. As requested, Hermione fell silent, only to be replaced by Dumbledore's loud voice.  
  
"Good evening to you all, and welcome to another year at Hogwarts. As is customary, first we'll be bringing in the first-years...here they come!" And indeed, Professor McGonagall entered the hall, carrying a stool and the Sorting Hat, followed by a string of nervous-looking children. Harry found himself marveling how small they all looked, despite being at most a year or two younger than him.  
  
A flash of red caught his eyes, and he remembered that Ron's sister Ginny was going to be there. He reached to his right and patted Ron's shoulder. "Don't worry; she'll be fine."  
  
"Who's worrying, mate?" Ron asked, but his voice betrayed a shake that could only be born of nerves. As they watched, a young, mousy boy was sorted into Gryffindor, and upon sitting, he pulled out a Muggle camera and took a picture of the ceiling.  
  
By the time "Weasley, Virginia," was called, Ron was nearly vibrating with tension.  
  
The hat remained there for only a brief moment, and then shouted out, "GRYFFINDOR!" Next to him, Harry heard Ron breathe in sharply, and he realized the other boy must have been holding his breath.  
  
The short girl hurried over to the table, amid a small hubbub of Weasleys; even Percy seemed amenable to offering a polite clap. She blushed when Ron gave her a brief hug, and ended up sitting across from Harry. There was a brief, complicated moment, when the two siblings managed to communicate a remarkable amount of information, after which, Ginny became a little more subdued.  
  
And then Dumbledore stood to speak.  
  
"Well, here we all are again. I'd like to start off this dinner by noting the rather tragic loss of our Defense Against the Dark Arts professor...I imagine, however, that he will not be missed. But I bring news of Mr. Quirrel's hopefully more useful successor, An Order of Merlin, Third Class, Honorary Member of the Dark Force Defense League, Mr. Gilderoy Lockhart." Harry didn't expect the raucous applause, and it left him a little startled. He glanced up at the staff table, where the ditzy blond man, now dressed in pale violet robes, was waving to the crowd. Harry was almost certain he heard something along the lines of, 'Forgot he's won the Witch Weekly's Most Charming Smile award 5 times' to his left, but dismissed it at hallucination.  
  
"Ah yes," Lockhart announced when the din died down, "I am very honored to have this position and look forward to helping shape the minds of the future. Thank you." Harry rolled his eyes and turned, intent on adding a scathing comment to Hermione, but she was watching the stage with a dreamy look on her face.  
  
While he would have understood perfectly if she were ogling Sirius, who had claimed a seat near the edge of the table, and despite being allegedly an assistant and therefore not worth mentioning, was stunning in his dark red robes, the ones he always wore on special occasions, he had a sneaking suspicion Hermione went for the pretty boys.  
  
"Honestly," Ron muttered, "You throw them a pretty face, and they start falling all over each other to drool over him." Harry leaned back and turned to Ron, who seemed at least coherent.  
  
"What, you'd prefer if Sirius were teaching us?"  
  
"Your godfather at least knows what he's doing," Ron said. "All Gilderoy has is a line of books telling his wonderful stories of traipsing about the Himalayas and the like killing monstrous beasts and shagging beautiful witches." Harry only let his eyebrow quirk at the rant, and Ron flushed a bit. "Well, I'm just saying I can't imagine him sitting in some hut in the rainforest writing while he was trying to kill some were-leopard or something. He just hasn't got the *time*."  
  
"Thought about this a lot?" Harry asked.  
  
"You won't *believe* how nutters my mum is over him. It's now a family rule we're not allowed to discuss him over dinner."  
  
There was suddenly a scream from down the table, and a loud scuffle resulting in a pot falling to the floor. Neville, Harry managed to think, before the most unearthly wail filled the hall. The people nearest the sound slumped bonelessly into their plates, and Harry found himself fighting for consciousness. The last thing he heard before he lost his grip on the waking world for the second time that day was Lockhart's voice from the staff table, announcing, "Oh, it's the curse of the banshee...there's no hope for any of them..."  
  
*  
  
So Harry woke up near midnight on the first day of his second day of school with a blinding headache. Ron was sitting up in his own bed, massaging his forehead.  
  
"What the bloody-"he started, then winced, as the sound of his voice cut through his brain like a ragged knife. Ron grinned in sympathy, and then pointed to Neville's bed. The boy was laying as if dead, only the movement of his chest hinting as his status among the living. 'What was it?' Harry mouthed, and Ron held up a single finger.  
  
Harry recognized the game. One word. Two syllables. First syllable...Ron pointed at himself. Wizard? Boy? Big boy...man! Ron tapped his nose, and then tapped his forearm with two fingers. Second syllable. An ear- tug. Sounds like...it looked like Ron was making a claw with his hands. Stab? Hit...scratch? No, Ron seemed to ponder this, and then ran the claw through his hair. Brush, comb, conditioner? No, to push back your hair like that...Rake? Yes! Man...rake? Man-mandrake!  
  
"You could have just told me," Harry muttered, but Ron just shrugged and pointed at his throat. He couldn't talk. Harry racked his brain, trying to remember what mandrake what supposed to be like. It had roots that looked like a human, and its cry-  
  
"Why aren't we dead?" he asked. Everyone in the hall must have heard that sound...  
  
Ron held his palms only an inch or two apart, and Harry nodded. So it had been a young mandrake, and probably explained why Neville had let it get into a position where it could be exposed. He was meticulous, mostly, about his plants, keeping the more dangerous ones under lock and key, and even made sure the mundane ones behaved themselves.  
  
It definitely made an interesting start to the year, he thought. On a whim, he drew out an old book from his trunk, 'The Book of Ages'. It had been a gift from Remus, and was supposed to contain the wisdom of the universe.  
  
He flipped open to a random passage, and the phrase that he read was very simple:  
  
"Go back to sleep. You're going to need it."  
  
*  
  
Well, as I said, I'm back. I suppose my excitement over PoA has sparked this again. And I assure you, things will start happening, and even now, there will be surprises. Maybe. 


	2. Death and Quidditch

The Road Not Taken: Book II  
  
---  
  
Standard Disclaimer: This is definitively AU, I'm not JK, don't make any claim to these characters, am making no profit from the writing of this, and rated PG-13 for death, weird stuff, and wonky symbolism.  
  
---  
  
At the breakfast table the next day, Professor Trelawney, the rather excitable Divinations professor, spent most of the meal loudly complaining to anyone who would listen that she had known this year would begin in death.  
  
Most of the students, however, bravely tried to ignore it. Most of the population of the school was nursing very unpleasant headaches, and the Gryffindor table was no exception. Apparently, Parvati Pavil had figured out Neville had a mandrake in the school, and in the ensuing scuffle to get it out of the Great Hall, the roots had been pulled out of the dirt, resulting in the school-wide fainting spell.  
  
Money changed hands regarding a sort of running bet as to which house lost points first, and both Neville and Parvati had retreated into melancholy. Harry felt that as the two students closest to the mandrake at the time of detonation, they'd suffered enough, but the Slytherins especially seemed to think differently.  
  
Although, he noted with some relief, he and Draco seemed to have some sort of unspoken truce, and the blond boy stayed out of the event, merely watching from afar.  
  
It was odd, but when the two were in the same room, Harry often got the unpleasant feeling that Draco was watching him. Not just looking at, but watching, as if waiting for something...sometimes, he was reminded of his odd dreams from before the year began, and the visit of the house-elf, something that only a very rich student could have arranged...  
  
Because the other possibility was that Draco was watching him the way that Ginny occasionally looked at him, only with a confidence the first-year student would never match.  
  
The day began with Potions, and with Severus Snape far from his normally cheery mood.  
  
He virtually snarled, "Good morning" to the class, and when asked about the year's curriculum, he nearly hexed Hermione.  
  
It was going to be a long day for everybody.  
  
---  
  
It was the next day when they had their first DADA class of the term, and Professor Lockhart was in (what it would soon prove) usual high spirits.  
  
"Welcome, welcome, all!" he announced to the group of students, many hidden behind high stacks of his own autobiographical works, the assigned texts. "Now, I know you're all eager to jump right in and tackle the hard stuff, but I think that first, we need to see how well you know your Dark Arts, eh?" And with a flourish, he produced a thick stack of papers. "I'm certain you've all had time to look through your textbooks a bit, but I want to see if you've picked anything up. Here's a pop quiz."  
  
It was not, as Harry expected, a quiz on Dark creatures and magic, but rather, a test about the specifics of Lockhart's life. Ranging from questions about Lockhart's personal ambitions ("If all the Dark creatures in the world were to vanish, how would I then contribute to society?") to inane questions whose only connection to Defense Against the Dark Arts was Lockhart himself ("What is my favorite shade of black?"), Harry knew he failed miserably.  
  
He really hoped this test wasn't graded.  
  
After an inordinately short amount of time, Lockhart announced the end of the test and whisked up all of the papers. Oddly, he did this by going around the room to everyone's desk, as opposed to the much quicker manner of most of the other teachers, simply summoning the tests to his desk in a stack.  
  
Then Lockhart clapped his hands and took roll. When he called "Longbottom, Neville," he paused for a very long moment, and then gave a thousand-watt grin.  
  
"Mr. Longbottom. Well, I quite imagine there's not much I can teach you, eh? Anyone who can take He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named must be phenomenal at Defense. Come on up and show us something, hmm?" Most of the males in the class managed some sympathy for Neville as he pushed himself from his seat, but Harry decided to take more direct action.  
  
"Professor, maybe you could show us instead how you would have handled the situation," he said.  
  
His gut feeling had been right; the opportunity to show off to the class seemed to take Lockhart over.  
  
"That's a splendid idea," he exclaimed. He moved as if to bound up the stairs in the room to his office, but paused for just a moment, examining Harry's face. "Wait a moment...I've met you before. You're Lupin's boy, right? What is your name?"  
  
"Harry P-"  
  
"Ah, Harry Lupin...can't quite say it rolls off the tongue like Gilderoy Lockhart, but it's a fine name, fine name. Wait just here a moment. Sean!"  
  
Lockhart vanished up the stairs, leaving the class to its own devices. Neville offered Harry a grateful smile.  
  
"I wasn't sure what I was going to do," he muttered. "I certainly can't-" He broke off, flushing, and Harry nodded. Neville couldn't even remember the fateful day still celebrated by most of the wizarding world, and thus couldn't manage to demonstrate anything to the class, even if he wanted to. And Harry didn't blame him for not wanting to remember that day. He himself had had a run-in with the (sort of) late wizard, and the memory had the power to leave him in a cold sweat.  
  
And then Lockhart reappeared, trailed by Sirius, who looked murderous and was carrying a cage covered with a black cloth.  
  
"I'm afraid I won't be able to humor you, Mr. Lupin, but I've got a lovely way to begin this year." He reached back and whipped off the cloth, revealing...  
  
"Cornish pixies?" Ron demanded. "Cornish pixies?! You've got to be bloody-" He stopped suddenly as Lockhart flicked the cage with his wand; the door exploded open, followed only a moment later by the flood of tiny blue creatures.  
  
"Don't worry," Lockhart shouted over the screams as pixies picked up backpacks, papers, students, throwing the room into utter chaos, "I've got this completely under control. Peskipiksi Pesternomi!"  
  
A passing pixie snatched his wand from his hand, and Professor Lockhart paled.  
  
In his rush to return to his office, he shoved Sirius out of his way, nearly unbalancing him. When he reached the top of the stairs, he shouted down at his assistant,  
  
"Sean, could you be a dear and show them how to capture the pixies? Thank you, I knew you'd help!" With that, he slammed the door to his office closed, leaving only four people in the room, the remaining students having fled the classroom.  
  
Sirius calmly placed the remains of the cage onto the floor, and turned to Harry, Ron, and Neville, the only students who had not been involved in the mass exodus.  
  
"Would you mind helping out?" he asked, flashing them the winning grin he always used when he knew his quarry couldn't resist the 'Sirius smile'. He yanked his wand from his robes, and flicked it negligently towards a pixie. "Calidi sangue," he snapped, and the pixie, its chirping growing faint and tired, began to slow, until it came to rest on a desk, its wings barely flapping. "It's a simple charm, and one I would have chosen for this."  
  
And then the next few minutes passed into students practicing a stunning charm with an almost-teacher, and when it was done, the three boys left the class chatting, and Harry wondering why Dumbledore hadn't told Lockhart to go packing when he could have Sirius teaching. Because in his opinion, Lockhart hadn't known how to handle the pixies.  
  
"That was a brilliant lesson!" Hermione announced when she met the boys outside the classroom. Harry exchanged a weary glance with Ron; Neville seemed to have retreated into his own world, and wasn't responding to much.  
  
Hermione was flushed and bright, as if she'd just been given a book with more than a thousand pages in it.  
  
Harry couldn't quite figure out why. She'd spent the past hour outside of the classroom while her teacher hid in his office from pixies!  
  
Even Professor Quirrel had proved competent in his field, even though his field had ended up including more Dark Arts than Defense...  
  
"Oh, yes, Professor Lockhart came out through a side passage and told us how he once helped eliminate a pixie infestation in Surrey. He wanted us to understand how dangerous pixies can be, and that you always need to be prepared for the unexpected."  
  
"'Mione, the man fled from a roomful of pixies like You-Know-Who was on his trail! We had to help Sirius capture them because Professor Blondie couldn't handle them himself!"  
  
"Really, Mr. Weasley, it is to be expected that you speak about your professors with more respect. Five points from Gryffindor." With a startled gasp, Ron spun around to meet the gaze of Professor Snape. The Potions master merely gave Ron a thin smile, and then brushed past the students towards the dungeons.  
  
"Bloody stupid Snape," he muttered, folding his arms. "I'll bet he knows that Lockhart's incompetent, and is just out to get me."  
  
"No, Ron, you need to treat your teachers with respect," Hermione growled. "I don't see where you get off talking about Professor Lockhart like that. He's a genius and I won't hear a word against him."  
  
With that, she turned, heading towards Herbology.  
  
---  
  
It was midway through October when Hermione threw herself onto a chair in the Common Room and complained she was bored.  
  
Harry gave her a sharp look, and asked her what first came to mind.  
  
"'Mione, you've always got some homework you think you should be doing, or someone to bother about studying, or someone to tutor..."  
  
"No, I don't," Hermione complained. "Neville was studying over the summer, and he's gotten much better. I'm surprised you haven't noticed."  
  
Now that she'd mentioned it, Harry could see what Hermione was talking about. Neville had been more confident in classes, speaking up a little more often, not stammering when called upon, even growing less terrified during Potions.  
  
A sudden laugh caught his attention, and another aspect of the changing Neville occurred to Harry. The boy had been growing more confident socially, as well. He'd started gathering some of the more nervous first-years around him, and took some of the stares he still got with cheerful dismissal. He suspected Neville was a shoo-in for prefect fifth year. And that was surprising, given the way Neville had been even up until the end of their first year.  
  
But leading fellow students through a maze, and taking a risk that could lead to your own death, and then...  
  
Neville hadn't met Lord Voldemort face-to-face, but the night must have changed him, as well.  
  
"Well, Hermione, you can't rely on tutoring helpless people all your life," Harry said, shrugging as Neville began telling a rather animated story to a small group of students that included Ginny Weasley.  
  
She was looking at Neville in a distinctly moist way, and Harry found himself wondering, rather relieved, if her crush had undergone a shift. Neville was a nice boy...but he wasn't certain if he should let Ron know about it.  
  
"Of course I can, as long as you and Ron continue to skive off your Astronomy homework," Hermione retorted. Harry snorted, and retreated upstairs to his room. 'The Book of Ages' was sitting, rather innocently, on his bed, next to a rather beaten set of tarot cards. Harry frowned. Sometimes, it seemed like that book had a mind of its own.  
  
Ron had given Harry the tarot cards; the redhead didn't believe in Divination, but Harry had wondered about it enough to try it out.  
  
Sitting on his bed, he set aside the book and picked up the cards. He began to shuffle them, letting his mind drift. He wondered what the year would bring. He was looking forward to it, but the warning still rung in his mind. Warnings from a dream, and from a house-elf.  
  
With quick movements, he revealed the top three cards of the deck.  
  
The Eight of Swords. The Moon. The Ten of Swords. Seeing the three images, Harry's mind began to swim.  
  
Restriction. Reflection. Bondage. Control.  
  
The Eight and the Ten, so close, yet a thousand miles apart.  
  
And between them...illusion. Falsehoods.  
  
Death.  
  
Trembling, Harry glanced at the next card in the series.  
  
It was not Death. For that, he was grateful. It was the Five of Cups; a black-robed figure stood before five overturned goblets. With a sigh, Harry put away the cards, and then glanced at the window.  
  
The sun was edging close to the horizon. He hadn't realized it had gotten late. A shiver touched him, even though it was still warm. He'd heard stories about the Sight, how men and women granted with the ability to see the future could lose hours, days, when taken by a vision.  
  
True Seers had few friends; one never knew when the Sight would appear, giving warnings of a friend's death, or a tragedy to both of them. Harry shook himself. He'd simply fallen asleep, lost track of time.  
  
Hermione thought Divination was a waste of time. And she was usually right about these things.  
  
He went down to dinner, confident in his decision.  
  
He didn't think to ponder what the Five of Cups meant. He hadn't read enough to know that the Five of Cups was a card of loss, of bereavement.  
  
He didn't know it was the card to fear when you feared death.  
  
---  
  
The weeks dragged on, until the first Quidditch match, the day before Halloween. Harry was fairly vibrating by the morning of the match, and Ron almost as nervous as he was.  
  
"Honestly, you two," Hermione groaned, shooting them both a sharp glare over the breakfast table, "You're acting like Harry's going to Azkaban for the rest of his life. It's a Quidditch match."  
  
"Against Slytherin," Ron muttered. "Which is almost as bad. They cheat."  
  
"That's an unfair generalization and you know it," Hermione snapped. "Nothing untoward is going to happen to Harry, I assure you. Now eat your breakfast and stop worrying. Harry will do fine, won't you, Harry?"  
  
Harry shrugged, and glanced up at the Slytherin table. Draco, looking towards the Gryffindors, gave a weak smile, and then looked down at his meal. Harry understood. Draco Malfoy had replaced the Slytherins' old Seeker, and that meant the two of them were competing today. There seemed to be a tacit agreement that they would try and keep their teammates in line, but there were some things you couldn't halt, and among them was the ancient rivalry between Slytherin and Gryffindor.  
  
Although his almost-friendship with Draco Malfoy made a mockery of the whole thing. Harry smiled privately at that. He felt very rebellious doing something Sirius would disapprove of, Sirius, who approved of everything from drinking and smoking to wild parties and raunchy jokes. It made things feel a little balanced, knowing what his father and Sirius must have put their respective parents through.  
  
Well, really just the Potters. The Blacks, as a whole, deserved every ounce of misery they received. Vega Black, especially, made Harry's whole body tingle. He'd met her only once, and if he never saw her again, he'd be delighted.  
  
---  
  
"And Gryffindor SCORES! That puts Gryffindor in the lead, 100 to 90. And it looks like both Potter and Malfoy are scouring the field. Neither one's spotted the Snitch yet. This might turn out to be a long game, folks. I hope you're fed up well."  
  
Harry grimaced as he executed another wide turn, eyes flicking across the field. The game had been going on for nearly an hour now, and the Snitch had evaded all notice. He wondered idly how they kept it inside the pitch, and whether it had fled. That would be a horrible joke, to play for days, only to realize the Snitch was inside the castle or something.  
  
Responding to what could only be an extra sense, Harry pulled right just as a Bludger sped past him, followed immediately by George Weasley, who batted the black ball towards Marcus Flint, the Slytherin captain.  
  
The ball made it halfway before it turned around and shot towards Harry.  
  
Harry dodged again, only this time, he kept moving as the Bludger, homing in on him like a Muggle missile, followed.  
  
George barely holding up behind him, Harry swerved through the other players, trying to pull the Bludger close enough to someone else to shift its attention onto them. But nothing worked.  
  
With a desperate shout, George gave his broom a burst of speed and came between Harry and the Bludger. Harry turned to face forward, but whipped his head back around when he heard a horrible 'crack'. George's bat was shattered, and his hand was poised at a very bad angle. And the Bludger was still coming.  
  
With a shout, Harry plunged forward, eyes still scanning the air for the Snitch, the goal that would end this game and get the Bludger away from him.  
  
Vaguely, he saw a flash of blond at his side, and heard someone shout a spell. The Bludger rocked, but didn't deviate from its murderous course. Harry began a complicated pattern of movement, forcing the Bludger to weave after him; if he hadn't taken such an evasive course, he might not have noticed the Snitch, hovering just above Draco's head.  
  
Harry grinned, and pushed his broom towards the other boy. Draco's eyes widened in shock when he realized that both Harry and the Bludger were heading straight for him. Harry laughed in triumph as Draco pulled away, fleeing the apparently suicidal Seeker. And then his hand was around the fluttering golden ball, Dean Thomas was shouting in ecstasy, and Draco's warning hit his ears a fraction of a moment too late.  
  
"Watch out, you bloody-"  
  
CRACK!  
  
Harry fell from his broom, his arm numb from the shock of the plummeting Bludger. He didn't remember hitting the ground, supposing he'd lost consciousness sometime during the fall.  
  
When he awoke, the sight of lavender nearly sent him into a fit.  
  
"Oh, poor boy's obviously been given a Madness Hex; I've got just the solution for that-" Professor Lockhart was muttering. Harry just tried to struggle out from under the man, but the sharp pain that suddenly dominated his senses left him gasping for breath. "And a broken arm-I'll fix that right up."  
  
"Shouldn't you wait for Madam Pomfrey?" Harry heard Draco ask in the background. Harry tried to send a mental thought along the lines of 'get him away from me', but it seemed the panicked look on his face was the only communication he was going to be sending. It seemed to be enough, however, when Sirius got close enough.  
  
His godfather's eyes were a cross between enraged and terrified, and Harry would have been amused had he not been in so much pain and had Gilderoy Lockhart not been about to try and fix a broken arm.  
  
"Get away from him!" Sirius snarled, and there was a sudden blur of movement, a flash of black, and then Sirius ran into the Defense Teacher, who dropped his wand with a squeak and fell back a few feet. And then Harry saw Madam Pomfrey approaching, and his heart lifted. She would be able to handle things, and...  
  
"Mr. Black! Get off Mr. Lockhart right this moment!" She then was at Harry's side, clucking at him. "I knew I'd see you again. It's just like your father, couldn't go a single year without some injury or another. Now, can anyone help us up?" Remus and Sirius both appeared by her side and obligingly helped carry Harry up to the castle, much to Harry's embarrassment. He tried telling them his arm was broken, not his legs, but neither seemed inclined to care. And Madam Pomfrey seemed pleased, whether at Harry's being forced to act with common sense for once, or Sirius being responsible, Harry wasn't sure which. After all, Sirius had ended up in the Infirmary far more than Harry had; it was a point of personal pride, however, that Sirius had never been as worse off as the people sent to the Infirmary at the same time.  
  
But the train of thought made Harry tired, and he fell asleep before they got inside.  
  
---  
  
A quiet noise woke Harry, and he reached out towards the sound before his eyes were even open. He must have moved pretty quickly, because there was a high-pitched squeak, and then something hit the floor with a soft 'thud'.  
  
Harry thought he recognized the sound, and when he got his glasses back on, the face of Dobby looked up at him mournfully from the floor.  
  
"What are you doing here?" he demanded, glaring at the small creature. At first Dobby didn't respond, and that gave Harry a moment to examine the house-elf. The creature cowered on the floor, a small bottle clutched in his hands. There was a strange scent rising from the bottle, one of roses, and...  
  
"And what in the world are you doing with a Draught of the Living Dead?"  
  
Dobby squeaked and tried to hide the bottle, but Harry jumped off his bed and snatched it from him. Professor Snape kept a bottle of the Draught of the Living Dead on his desk; it was said that he threatened the more serious offenders in his class with a sip from it. The fact that it was over twenty years old made the potion even more dubious than it otherwise would.  
  
It was also highly illegal.  
  
"Er..."  
  
Harry narrowed his eyes. He had his suspicions about Dobby. That the little creature appeared so soon after his odd dream of a warning was more than coincidence. And now that he was skulking around Harry's hospital bed, with a highly potent demi-poison.  
  
"Out with it."  
  
"Harry Potter is in terrible danger! Dobby wants to get Harry Potter away from Hogwarts. So when Harry got to school anyway, Dobby thought if Harry was hurt very badly..." Harry shook the elf violently, growling.  
  
"That was you?" Dobby only bent his head as Harry shook him back and forth. "Lockhart nearly got near me with a wand because of that! I'm going to kill you..."  
  
"Dobby hears that a lot. Master is a wonderful man, but he thinks Dobby does not do well, and he thinks Dobby is too much trouble." Harry slowed his shaking down, and then stopped. Dobby hung loosely in his grasp.  
  
"I have to stay here, Dobby," Harry explained. "I've got friends here. Hermione, Ron, Neville...and Ron expects me to keep an eye out for Ginny." Dobby nodded, his eyes sad.  
  
"Dobby understands. If Dobby had friends, Dobby would want to protect them, too. Dobby understands that Harry Potter has friends. But Harry Potter does not have as many friends as he thinks he does. You would do well to remember that." There was a sharp crack, and both house-elf and bottle vanished, leaving Harry alone in the Infirmary.  
  
---  
  
"It'sssss Halloweeen...letssss usssss go. Letsssss ussss out. Letsss usssss kill."  
  
Harry sat up, shouting in surprise. However, even as he woke, the voice grew faint, moving...somewhere else. Harry threw himself out of bed, only bothering to grab his glasses before he fled the room. He followed the faint sounds of a speaking voice through the hallways, stumbling over stone and rugs in his pajamas. He remembered that voice, and he knew it was bad.  
  
He skidded around a corner, just barely avoiding a collision with Sirius, who was wandering in the opposite direction, clothed only in an ungodly pink bathrobe.  
  
"Harry?" he asked, sounding unusually energetic for five in the morning. Harry took no notice, sprinting down the hall as the voice in his head rose to an almost (he hated to think it) orgasmic crescendo.  
  
"Yesssss..."  
  
Harry grabbed his wand, which burned to the touch, slammed into the door from which the voice came, and shouted at the terror he was sure laid within.  
  
And he came face-to-face with a full-grown werewolf.  
  
He had forgotten that it was still the night of the full moon, and that the moon didn't set for another 15 minutes.  
  
He forgot to move, to breathe, or to think, which is why it took him nearly a minute to realize the wolf wasn't moving. Or breathing. His godfather's finace, in fact, looked stuffed. Harry stepped away, tears gathering in his eyes.  
  
"Oh, shit."  
  
"Wha-Harry? Harry, what did you do?" Harry started, and turned to face Sirius. The question was obviously rhetorical, as Sirius could see into the room. And, beyond that, Sirius looked heartbroken.  
  
"I-I don't know," Harry managed to choke out. "I just-"  
  
"It is obvious what has happened here," Professor Snape said from the side in his smooth, cutting voice. "Harry Potter has killed his teacher."  
  
"I'm quite certain your initial assessment is mistaken, Severus," a new voice intoned. Professor Dumbledore swept past the tableau, the dead wolf, and pointed at a corner of the room nearly invisible from the hall.  
  
For, written in blood on the stone of the room was a message. 'THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS HAS BEEN OPENED. DIRTY BLOOD WILL MARK YOU FOR DEATH.'  
  
---  
  
Ooh...yeah, I like cliffhangers. The next part is already in the works, so you won't have to wait long.  
  
I think.  
  
Anyhoo, enjoy! 


	3. The Rumor Mill

So, here we are again. Part 3. I'm not JK, however, and am just playing with her characters. I'll put them back, I promise. And just to warn you, this is prolly PG-13 for yelling, near-death experiences, and other stuff. Enjoy.  
  
--  
  
Dumbledore quietly whisked the four of them to the Infirmary, where Madam Pomfrey discovered the best news of the day.  
  
"He's not dead," she said smartly, pulling a sheet over the still-stiff wolf. She turned to Dumbledore. "It's a good deal more serious than that. He's been Petrified."  
  
Professor Snape let out a small sigh; Harry, standing next to him, could have sworn the Potions master looked relieved. He had to admit that he felt much better knowing Remus was still alive. It was even better to see Sirius' face light up at the news.  
  
"Petrified?" Harry asked. "How is that worse?"  
  
"It takes very little skill to kill somebody, Harry. It takes immeasurably more skill to Petrify them." Madam Pomfrey shook her head. "Luckily, there is a cure for every type of Petrification. However, until we can discover the cause of Mr. Lupin's...condition, I would not dare to attempt any of them."  
  
"What?" Sirius demanded. "You can't just leave him like that! I...what are you going to tell the students? How are we going to deal with that? Who's going to teach History?"  
  
Professor Dumbledore finally adopted an expression appropriate to the gravity of the situation. "We will recall Professor Binns from retirement."  
  
--  
  
When Harry returned to the common room, Ginny was sitting in one of the large chairs, reading her Herbology textbook. She looked up as Harry came in.  
  
"Harry? What's-" She broke off at the sight of Harry's face. "What happened?"  
  
"Remus," he whispered.  
  
Ginny's eyes widened momentarily before she snarled, and she narrowed them into a piercing glare. "That monster..." She suddenly glanced up at Harry. "Harry, I..."  
  
"No, Ginny," he murmured, navigating the near-maze of couches and chairs to the stairway, "I just want to be alone right now." She watched him climb up the stairs, a small frown on her lips. However, when he had finally disappeared, she shook her head.  
  
"I know you don't want to be alone, Harry. Just...let him be there for you." She looked down at her textbook, and then made a few notes in the small journal lying in its binding.  
  
--  
  
"Ron, wake up." Ron opened his eyes to see Harry sitting over him in his pajamas, shaking Ron's shoulder. The other boy looked desperate, terrified, and when he saw Ron's eyes were opened, he threw himself onto Ron, sobbing into his pajama top.  
  
Ron had not seen Harry like this, even when he'd been in the heights of his obsessive investigation in the last school year. So he tried to handle it in his own way: namely, awkwardly.  
  
Ron pushed himself into a sitting position, cradled Harry against his chest, and rubbed his back. Harry didn't seem to notice this, only his grip on Ron's shirt marginally tightening when Ron tried to move. After a minute or two, Ron had woken up enough to think.  
  
"Harry, what happened?"  
  
"Remus." Harry's voice was scratchy, painful. He pulled his head up to look into Ron's eyes. The green was ringed with red, indicating Harry had been crying for a while. "I woke up, and I heard...and when I got to his room, he was..." A shuddering breath cut Harry off. "'Dirty blood will mark you for death.' That's what it said on the wall. What-what's the Chamber of Secrets?"  
  
"What? Harry, Remus isn't...dead, is he?"  
  
"No," Harry muttered, chuckling. "He's not dead. It's worse. He's Petrified."  
  
"How is that worse?"  
  
"Because it's harder to Petrify someone than to kill him. It's..." Harry pulled away, and turned to his bed. "Of course!" He jumped off of Ron's bed, and before Ron could respond, Harry had retrieved his Tarot cards and returned to Ron's side. "This can tell us who did this. Look..." Harry flipped three cards up in quick succession.  
  
The 4 of Pentacles. The High Priestess. And...the Moon.  
  
Harry's eyes rolled back in his head, and he spoke, a strange, sepulchral sound that echoed from the depths of his soul, or deeper.  
  
"He desires to destroy that which does not conform. He will control the very instrument of our doom, and his gaze will be all-seeing and eternal."  
  
Then Harry snapped back to normal, and fell half over Ron, who quietly picked up the cards, made Harry as comfortable as he could, and then went to take a shower.  
  
He passed Neville in the common room, and saw Ginny returning from the girls' room as he entered. He didn't speak to either; he found time to only think about Harry's words, and his strange prophecy.  
  
--  
  
"Okay, what is going on, Ron?" Hermione had been trying the entire day to get ahold of Ron, but he always seemed to be with Harry (not an unusual occurrence, but normally, you could actually get the two of them out of each other's eyesight without Ron getting fidgety. But Professor Sprout had paired Harry with Neville in Herbology, so she finally had a chance to talk.  
  
Ron snipped dead leaves from a carnivorous vine, ignoring Hermione. She sighed, and then nudged him, hard.  
  
"Ron! No one's seen Professor Lupin all day-"  
  
"The full moon was last night."  
  
"There's a cordoned-off bed in the Infirmary, Ron, and the teachers are all acting strangely. I heard Snape didn't talk during the fourth-year Gryffindor class, and the twins had 'plans'." Ron sighed.  
  
"'Mione, if they're not telling students, I think I shouldn't-" He froze, staring at his hand. There was a line of spiders crawling over the greenhouse bench, over his hand and towards the woods. "Oh, shit..." There was a long moment, and then Ron let out a blood-curdling scream. It went on for a long time.  
  
Hermione, thankfully, was able to figure out the problem, and flicked the spiders off. Ron, still hysterical, stopped screaming, but continued to breathe hard even after the spiders were gone. It was unsurprising that the entire class was staring at them. Hermione then noticed Harry hovering over her, so she stepped aside and let him lead the hyperventilating boy off to calm down. Neville stayed behind, shaking his head.  
  
"Those two are really a piece of work, huh?"  
  
"I must admit, they do have a...unique life experience." Hermione glanced sidelong at Neville. "Not that you don't, of course." She glanced down at the table, to the vine, which was hissing a bit, trying to snap at the small trickle of spiders. "What do you think they're doing here?"  
  
"No idea," Neville muttered, "but I'm sure they're up to no good." With a sharp movement, he smashed several of them into the hardwood bench.  
  
"Mr. Longbottom!" Professor Sprout hurried across the greenhouse, scooping up the spiders into her hand. "Really, you should know better than that. Spiders are helpful to the botanical world; they eat harmful insects and other nasty bugs. Five points from Gryffindor. And now, I'll be taking these little helpers over to --my-- strangler vine." Muttering about needless cruelty and stupid, short-sighted gardeners, Professor Sprout crossed back to her bench. Then she whirled on the class.  
  
"Get back to work!" she snapped. As Harry and Ron seemed to have vanished (Hermione hoped the Infirmary, where they would at least have a legitimate excuse for skipping class, but she had little hope for those two), Neville joined Hermione on her bench.  
  
"I wish I knew what was going on," Hermione muttered. "Normally, those two share all of their crackpot theories and worries with me so I can talk sense into them."  
  
"It's Professor Lupin," Neville said. "I heard Ginny telling some of the other first-years. She went down to the Infirmary for a Pepper-Up Potion and saw him in one of the beds. She said his face was really pale, and he wasn't moving."  
  
"Oh, yes, I heard that, too!" Parvati said excitedly from across them. "No one knows what's going on, but I heard they're bringing in a substitute."  
  
"Professor Lupin hurt?" Hermione shook her head. "That can't be right."  
  
--  
  
But it seemed to be right. The rumors had gotten so wild and elaborate by evening that Harry had heard everything…except the truth. He'd also heard a lot about Professor Binns, Remus' replacement, an abysmal teacher who had no hope of retiring early given the fact he hadn't even stopped teaching when he'd died.  
  
He had little time to worry about it, however, because at dinner, he noticed other students behaving oddly. Seamus Finnigan, one of the more boisterous first-year Gryffindors, apologized for running into him coming into the Great Hall. And he had the feeling people were talking about him whenever his back was turned.  
  
When he sat down, even Ron seemed to be a little nervous. The only person who seemed to be even remotely interested in meeting his eyes was Ginny, who kept scooting closer to him. Finally, she stopped, and cleared her throat.  
  
"What is it, Ginny?"  
  
He never figured out what Ginny wanted to say, because at that moment, Neville nudged her aside and sat next to Harry. Ginny reddened and fled to the other side of the table, and when she'd gotten there, Neville just smiled.  
  
"If I didn't know better, I'd say she had a crush on me," he said. "And how are you doing?"  
  
"All right, I guess," Harry replied. He stabbed a potato with little enthusiasm. "I'm just not feeling very well, and Ron's been acting strange since Potions."  
  
"Didn't Ron get paired with Draco?"  
  
"Yeah, but I don't-" Harry stopped, fork halfway to his mouth. He narrowed his eyes. "Malfoy!" He was on his feet and walking towards the Slytherin table with deliberately slow steps before Neville could respond.  
  
Draco lifted his head to meet Harry's eyes, but when he saw the look in them, he pushed himself back, overturning the bench. Harry whipped out his wand and snapped, "Pedignis!"  
  
Nothing happened for a moment, and then Draco began dancing wildly as smoke rose from his feet. "What the hell are you doing, Potter?" he shouted. When Harry's wand made the signature flick of the world's most versatile levitation spell, however, Draco shot back with, "Mortifica animis!" There was a sharp, high-pitched squeal, and then Harry slumped to the floor. "That'll teach you to duel a Malfoy." There was an extended pause, as the Great Hall fell silent, and then Draco glanced down at the recumbent form.  
  
"Hey, he cursed me first."  
  
--  
  
"-think he deserved it, but I was terrified. I thought he was going to...well, what he did to Professor Lupin." Harry's consciousness returned in a familiar setting, his own bed. And it sounded like the other boys were also up in the room.  
  
"I thought he was going to slam Malfoy into a wall," Seamus said.  
  
Something nagged at Harry as they spoke; he thought he should know what they were talking about, but it kept eluding him.  
  
"Harry didn't attack anyone," Neville snarled from what was far enough away to be his own bed. "Yes, he tried to hex Draco Malfoy, but that's because he thought Draco told Ron something to make him avoid Harry."  
  
"I'm not avoiding Harry," Ron protested. "I was just a little...worried."  
  
"Harry bloody well faced Voldemort himself to keep me from having to do it," Neville said, "He hasn't attacked anybody."  
  
Wait...attacked?  
  
They thought...  
  
But where had they heard about it?  
  
"What are you guys talking about?" Harry sat up, feeling to the side for his glasses. When the room came into focus, the assembled boys stood, frozen in his gaze. Then most of the others fled, leaving Harry and Ron alone in the bedroom. "Ron?"  
  
Ron sighed, and then crossed the room to Harry's bed. "Madam Pomfrey said you were fine. It was just a simple stunning spell." Harry put a hand on Ron's arm, and he fell silent. "Harry, we know you're not like that, but there's these rumors..."  
  
"What rumors?"  
  
"That you opened the Chamber of Secrets. That you attacked Professor Lupin."  
  
--  
  
The next week passed rather tensely, as rumors and tension increased. Quidditch practices were cut down to a bare minimum, and students were not allowed outside without an escort. And everyone was trying to understand everything they could about the Chamber of Secrets, about which there seemed to be little written.  
  
In fact, Harry heard almost nothing about it until the fateful Defense class when Sirius actually returned. It had been obvious that he knew far more about the subject than Professor Lockhart, and had in fact spent most of the classes fighting to keep Lockhart remotely on topic. In the week since Remus had been petrified, Sirius' influence had been absent, meaning class was an increasingly self-adoring monologue, with occasional parts for Neville and Harry to play in the re-enactments of his life.  
  
Harry seemed to be often pulled in for the roles of the horrendous beasts Lockhart had vanquished in his career, and Neville seemed content to usually end up as the adoring public.  
  
When Sirius returned, however, Professor Lockhart seemed to be in a surprisingly sedate or understanding mood. He wandered into the room, held up his hands for quiet, and then looked around the classroom.  
  
"Now, I know we've all been having a wonderful time in class, but today, I'm going to tell you about a topic very important to your future safety. You see, we have recently heard about a tragedy to befall Harry's father over here, involving the legendary Chamber of Secrets. Apparently, Salazar Slytherin, some old bloke from back then who everybody's forgotten, thought that you shouldn't let Mudbloods into Hogwarts. So he built a great chamber and hid a horrid monster inside of it.  
  
"Now, I want to teach you how to defend yourself against what I'm sure this monster is: the gorgon!"  
  
The classroom fell into a horrified hush, but Harry noticed something other than Lockhart's largely nonsensical babblings. Sirius was standing by the room's blackboard, and at the mention of the word 'gorgon', he stiffened.  
  
"The gorgon's gaze is known to petrify its victims, transforming them from living, breathing, contributing members of society into unresponsive, mostly-dead logs of rigor mortis. Anyone who dares meet the gaze is doomed unless a man well-armed with a shiny surface can destroy the gorgon and a skilled potions-master can craft the arduously difficult Gorgon's Tongue potion."  
  
At that, Sirius closed his eyes, and Harry saw his fist tighten. He turned to Hermione, who looked very pale.  
  
"What's wrong?"  
  
"The Gorgon's Tongue potion contains silver nitrate," Hermione whispered back. "If a gorgon attacked Professor Lupin, he can't safely be revived."  
  
At the front of the room, Lockhart continued, unaware of his assistant's growing discomfort. "Which means as soon as Madam Pomfrey can whip up a good potion, the good Professor Lupin will be right as rain. And in the meantime, you really ought to carry mirrors with you, in case you run into that nasty gorgon."  
  
"Actually, Professor Lockhart, you're quite mistaken." Neville stood from the rear of the room. "A gorgon couldn't have possibly attacked Professor Lupin. Gorgons are deathly afraid of night creatures, especially those loosely classified by the ancient Greeks as the 'athanatos': werewolves, vampires, and other such nocturnal beasts. Furthermore, a gorgon's gaze merely stuns a victim, so that her snakes can fully petrify it with their venom; for one to get that close to a werewolf on the night of a full moon is preposterous. And finally, gorgons are herbivores and only use their gazes in self-defense."  
  
Neville fell silent, and the room remained so for quite some time, until voices began buzzing quietly.  
  
"-a werewolf?"  
  
"But he seemed like a nice man-"  
  
Neville paled as the murmuring grew louder.  
  
"Oh, my..." He turned to Sirius to apologize for accidentally revealing this secret, but Sirius had fled the room, and Harry, agitated, looked like he wanted to follow. Professor Lockhart looked at the chaos in the room, seemingly oblivious to the cause.  
  
"Oh, well, then I suppose this would be as good a time as any to announce that Professor Snape and I have decided to start a little dueling club. We'll be meeting in the Great Hall after dinner Thursdays. I daresay it'll help us get our mind off of this little unpleasantness, eh?" He paused, and glanced at Harry, whose hand was raised and twitching. "Mr. Lupin?"  
  
"It's --Potter--," Harry snarled through gritted teeth, "And I was wondering if I might go and try to cheer up my godfather, --Sirius--, who seems to have been upset with your flippant discussion of his best friend's affliction."  
  
And without waiting for Lockhart's permission, Harry stood up, picked up his bags, and stormed from the classroom, slamming the door after him.  
  
--  
  
"Sirius? Sirius?" Harry pushed open the door to Sirius and Remus' room, a cozy place set near the History of Magic classroom, unsurprised to find his godfather with his bed buried into the room's bed, specifically Remus' pillow. "Are you all right? Mum's been worried sick about you, you know."  
  
"I'm fine, don't let the door hit you on your way out," Sirius snapped. "And tell Lily she can go sod herself." There was a tense pause, and then he added, "On second thought, don't."  
  
"Sirius...he's going to be fine. You should have heard Neville rip into Lockhart, going on about gorgons." Sirius rolled over on the bed, letting suspiciously moist eyes meet Harry's own.  
  
"But we don't know what's done it. Hell, half the school thinks you did it to him. And now everyone knows...he's going to kill someone when he comes out of this." Sirius scooted back so he was sitting proper, and then patted the bed beside him. "Come on, sit down."  
  
Harry joined his godfather, and when they'd gotten comfortable, Sirius just sighed.  
  
"Remus is going to be fine, right?" Harry asked.  
  
"As soon as we figure out what this thing is. And who opened the Chamber of Secrets. Although I've heard rumors..." Sirius shook his head. "I didn't believe them the first time around, and I won't believe it again."  
  
"What do you mean by that?" Harry asked.  
  
"Nothing," Sirius said. "It's...nothing. It's just that...this happened before, Harry. People were hurt, and in the end, someone died. And it was a boy a lot like you named Tom Riddle that stopped it. He was able to figure out who'd opened the Chamber and stop the monster. The boy responsible was expelled and his wand snapped in half." Harry sat back, frowning a little.  
  
"But how do you know about that?"  
  
"My family," Sirius said darkly, "knew a lot about these sorts of things." Harry shuddered at the reference to Sirius' family, especially his mother, Vega Black.  
  
Rumors still flew about the Blacks and their involvement in the war, and although nothing was proven, there were some circles still in which Vega Black was spoken of with more fear than Lord Voldemort himself.  
  
"So don't go and do anything stupid," Sirius said. "It's dangerous out there, and I want you to stay safe."  
  
--  
  
"This is stupid," Ron grumbled. "I doubt we're going to learn anything from Lockhart and Snape."  
  
"Hmph. Professor Lockhart is one of the most well-known enemies of the Dark Arts in the world. I would think he would know something about dueling." Hermione carefully flipped open a small notebook and pulled a ballpoint pen from her robes. She tended to use the pen when she wanted to take impeccable notes, which meant the purple, sparkly pen was seen most often in Defense Against the Dark Arts, the notes from which filled three full-sized spiral-bound notebooks.  
  
Harry personally agreed with Ron that Lockhart would most likely only teach them anything accidentally, and in that case only by counterexample.  
  
Professor Snape, on the other hand, was rumored to desire the position of Defense professor, have been a Death Eater, one of Voldemort's elite, a spy for the powers of good, and/or a transsexual lesbian vampire (the latter Harry had only heard from a nervous Ravenclaw first-year student affectionately or maliciously named 'Loony Luna').  
  
Whatever the rumors, he surely knew enough about dueling to successfully run a dueling club and teach the students of Hogwarts a thing or two about fighting with magic.  
  
The Great Hall held clumps of anxious and excited students chatting about the upcoming session when Lockhart and Snape entered the hall, the former looking pleased, and the latter looking annoyed.  
  
"Good evening, everybody," Lockhart said. "Let's start this little club with some demonstrations. Now, we think it's very important for you to first know how to disarm your opponent. But first..." He turned to Professor Snape, raising his wand in a threatening manner. "Ex-"  
  
"Expelliarmus," Snape snapped, flicking his wrist dismissively and inhumanly quickly at Lockhart. Flying backwards with a loud bang, Lockhart lost his grip on his wand, which flew in a neat arc into Snape's hand. The Defense teacher groaned as he sat up from his landing place.  
  
"You didn't tell me you liked it rough, Sevvie," he gasped.  
  
"Perhaps," Snape hissed, "we should allow the students to try this for themselves. Let us choose two students to demonstrate. Ah...Potter. Come here." Harry approached Snape slowly, not entirely certain what his intentions were. But Snape's eyes held no more than their base amount of malice for all people.  
  
And Lockhart glanced around the crowd, frowning. And then his eyes fell on Neville Longbottom.  
  
"Mr. Longbottom! I think you'll do well to show Mr. Potter a thing or two about dueling. Now come over here..."  
  
Harry stopped next to Snape, who leaned in close. "Now, Potter, I'm going to teach you a very important spell that will at best block a malicious spell, and at least deflect it onto someone else." Snape made a complicated gesture with his hand, ending with a sideways snap of his wrist. "Can you do that?"  
  
"I..." Harry nodded, certain he looked more confident than he felt.  
  
"Good." He glanced to the side, and saw Lockhart drop his wand in an attempt to demonstrate something to Neville. He felt a bit more confident, although he still felt worried. Snape thought he could do this, and there seemed a chance to at least attempt to redeem himself by responding well in this duel.  
  
"Step to the center of the room!" Snape shouted, and a circle was suddenly open in the crowd of students. "Harry, Neville, bow to each other. And ready, set, start!"  
  
Harry began a simple stun spell, hoping to catch Neville off-guard, but something in Neville's movements suggested that something was wrong.  
  
"Serpevenes!" Neville shouted, and from the tip of his wand shot a thin stream of smoke that shot towards Harry. Harry's body reacted instinctually to the attack, doing the last thing it had remembered doing. The smoke reflected off of his hand and hit the ground, solidifying into a wicked-looking cobra, which began to slide purposefully towards the gathered students.  
  
"Hey! Get away from them!" Harry shouted, readying his wand and trying to think of something he could do to stop the snake. He wasn't sure a regular stunning spell would work, but-  
  
--You are no massster to me-- the snake replied, pausing to look back at Harry. He froze, not sure if his ears were deceiving him. But the snake was glaring at him, and the words were too responsive to be mere imagination.  
  
"But you'll hurt them. Please, just go away." Harry gestured to the windows, and the snake peered at that side of the room, considering. And then it lunged towards the windows, but diverged a moment before, striking towards a Hufflepuff named Justin Finch-Fletchley.  
  
"Back OFF!"  
  
Harry swung his wand, inaccurate, wild, driven only by the desire to get the snake away. The snake's strike froze, and the creature dropped to the ground, stunned. It turned, hissing angrily.  
  
--Who are you?--  
  
There was a flash of light as Snape appeared, banishing the snake to whatever shadowy realm from which it had come. Breathing hard, Harry looked up at Snape, hoping to see anything encouraging in the professor's eyes. But Snape looked just as cold and annoyed as ever. He glanced around the room, and at the frightened students.  
  
"I think we should adjourn for today." As the others scattered, Harry noticed them giving him a wide berth, whispering.  
  
"Professor," Harry began.  
  
"I think you and I will go and have a little chat with Professor McGonagall," Snape interrupted. "Come along, Harry." As they left the Hall, he shook his head. "You've got your father's gift for defensive magic, Potter. Although I think it was too much to expect you to have your mother's cool head. You should have handled the snake by yourself instead of deflecting it onto someone else. It is acceptable to make a curse someone else's problem when that person is an enemy, but a top duelist is expected to know how to neutralize any threat to himself without endangering anyone else. Five points from Gryffindor. We're here."  
  
He stopped in front of McGonagall's office, and knocked on the door. And Harry, not knowing whether he'd been complimented or insulted, was shoved in front of Professor McGonagall, who was calmly eating a chocolate biscuit.  
  
"Severus," she said, standing and knocking most of the biscuit onto the floor. She glanced at Harry, and rolled her eyes. "And what do you believe Harry is responsible for now?"  
  
"During a mock duel this evening he, rather unaware of any sense of propriety, revealed to some thirty students that he is a Parselmouth."  
  
"A Parselmouth? That's ridiculous! I can't be a Parselmouth; they're-"  
  
"Vicious, evil monsters that ought to be put down, Mr. Potter? I imagine you've a godfather with rather...strong views on that sort of subject." Snape gave a self-satisfied smirk as Harry's jaw dropped. Sure, Parselmouths were among the most feared wizards, due a long history of wicked Parselmouths who used their talents for evil. But that would just make the average people with the talent want to hide it.  
  
"I..."  
  
"I think I'm no longer needed here," Snape said, and gave McGonagall a sharp salute before leaving the room. Harry watched him go, still in a state of shock.  
  
"I...Professor McGonagall, I still can't be a Parselmouth. I mean, I don't talk to snakes."  
  
"Really?" McGonagall made a sharp flick of her wand, and a teapot on her desk transformed into a small snake.  
  
--Yaa! What the...who the devil are you? Where am I?--  
  
"Er...calm down," Harry said, reaching out to the snake, who didn't seem to be particularly poisonous, hoping to keep it from thrashing wildly on the desk. "That's just Professor McGonagall. She's...pretty cool, for a teacher."  
  
The snake was suddenly gone, and McGonagall shook her head at Harry.  
  
"Harry, do you realize you weren't speaking English?"  
  
"Pardon?"  
  
"You were speaking Parseltongue, Harry." She sat down in her chair, shaking her head. With a start, she reached out and shoved her tin of chocolate biscuits towards Harry. "Here, take one. Harry, I want you to understand that if you have any problems, if anyone treats you unfairly because of this...revelation, you can come to me.  
  
"I must say, I should have expected this sort of thing from you, Harry, after that fracas from last year." McGonagall shook her head, sighing. "Your father at least was in control of most of the trouble he got into."  
  
--  
  
Harry left McGonagall's office feeling somewhere between much better and terrified for the future. People in the school were frightened, and a Parselmouth among them would make things worse. The original rumors had even fingered Harry as the culprit, and this would only make things worse.  
  
And then there was a sound, something between sob and a shout, around the corner.  
  
Harry broke into a jog, pulling out his wand as he rounded the corner, stopping when he saw Justin Finch-Fletchley in the hall, lying on the ground.  
  
'Not again...' He approached the boy, reaching out a cautious hand to nudge him. When a light touch didn't rouse the boy, Harry grabbed his shoulder.  
  
It was stiff, unyielding, as if it were made of stone. Harry recoiled, shouting. And then he looked up, and saw what else decorated the dark corridor. A misty white form hovered near the entrance to what looked like a girls' bathroom; upon closer inspection, the form revealed itself to be a female ghost.  
  
A ghost? She wasn't moving, and that made him wonder: what could...kill, for lack of a better word, a ghost?  
  
And then his mind stopped when he saw the writing on the wall.  
  
'LOOK UPON THE POWER OF THE HEIR, AND HIS SERVANT. BEWARE, HOGWARTS, AND ALL THOSE OF IMPURE BLOOD.'  
  
"Harry?" Harry turned at the sound of the voice behind him, and when he met Ginny's eyes, he saw something he'd never seen in another person's eyes: fear. "Harry, I have to tell you something." She took a few steps towards him, her footsteps unsteady. "I saw..." She stopped moving, her entire body shaking. And then suddenly, she turned and fled the hallway.  
  
"You're in real trouble now, Potter," Draco said, turning the corner in front of him, looking at the wall. "Unless you've got a great alibi, you could even be expelled."  
  
-- 


	4. Gifts and Prophecies

Here I am again. Yadda, yadda, yadda, please don't sue and recognize this as a mark of my respect for JK and her books, etc, etc, etc. Be warned: people yell, get nearly killed, and have angst for no apparent reason.  
  
Enjoy.  
  
--  
  
As McGonagall hurried him through the corridors towards Dumbledore's office, all Harry could think about was that prat, Draco. It was obvious now that Draco knew exactly what was going on, and was doing everything in his power to get Harry away from it. Even if Harry ended up in Azkaban.  
  
Harry tightened his grip on the small book McGonagall had handed to him when she'd arrived on the scene. He didn't know where she'd found it or why she thought he needed it, but he held onto it just the same.  
  
"Non-pareils," Professor McGonagall announced, and there was rumbling and movement, and after a time, Harry was standing in a large, chaotic office. "Wait here, Harry, while I find Albus. I do hope he hasn't gone wandering in the portraits..."  
  
And then Harry was alone with the small book, the strange contraptions filling Dumbledore's office, and a pale, scrawny, and unhealthy bird sitting in a gilded cage.  
  
Harry decided to avoid looking at anything, and flipped open the book.  
  
There was a squawk from the bird, who took to the air with rapid, awkward strokes. It landed in Harry's lap, pecking madly at his hands; Harry screamed and threw the bird and book away from him. They hit the ground together, and burst into flames.  
  
Harry desperately tried to beat out the flames, but to no avail, and when the door opened, revealing Dumbledore, Harry stopped, finding he was holding the notebook, covered in a fine layer of ash.  
  
"I didn't mean to do it, Professor! I was just-and it swooped-and..."  
  
"Oh, did Fawkes finally do it?" Dumbledore asked, peering at the sorry grey pile sitting in front of Harry with interest. "I've been telling him he's been looking terrible." He then bent down and scooped an unremarkable grey sphere from the pile of ash, which he deposited into a cage. "This, Harry, is Fawkes, my phoenix."  
  
"Phoenix...?" Harry asked in wonder. "Then he's not-"  
  
"Dead? Oh, heavens, yes. And no, of course. It is one of the great mysteries of the natural world, the miracle of the phoenix. His death and rebirth is a metaphor for one of the great Muggle religions, you know. But all myths aside, phoenixes are quite remarkable creatures. Loyal to a fault, terrifically strong, and vicious fighters. A man with a phoenix at his side will surely leave the day victorious, as legend has it that if a phoenix cries at the grave of its master, it can grant its marvelous power and revive a man even from beyond the very veil of death."  
  
"Revive...but does that mean-" Dumbledore shook his head, lifting his hand to stop Harry.  
  
"The phoenix will not befriend any but the purest and bravest of men, Harry, so it is unlikely that Voldemort would have ever met a phoenix, much less befriend one. And besides, Voldemort was a Parselmouth, as well, Harry, and phoenixes --eat-- snakes.  
  
"And that, Harry, seems to have brought us to you and by association, your problem. Harry, please tell me: were you responsible for what happened to Justin and...oh, dear."  
  
"Oh dear? What does that mean?" Harry demanded.  
  
"Only that poor Myrtle would not appreciate the irony of what has happened tonight, Harry," Dumbledore said. He seated himself at his desk, and folded his hands in front of him. "Harry, I do not believe that you are the Heir of Slytherin. Nor do I believe you have attacked anyone. However, in light of these recent events, I do not doubt that others will come to an erroneous conclusion. Now, Harry, I wonder if it might not be best for you to..."  
  
"I'm not leaving," Harry said. 'It's what Draco would want,' he thought rebelliously. Because he had to stop this. He had to see it through. "Malfoy-"  
  
"Mr. Malfoy is not what he seems, Harry. I had come under the impression that you two had found some understanding."  
  
"I-we had, Professor. I...I'm not being punished, am I?"  
  
"No, Harry."  
  
"Then I have to go."  
  
As Harry stood to leave, Dumbledore placed a hand on his shoulder. "Harry, if there's anything you need to talk about, if something is going on you think I should know about...feel free to talk to me."  
  
"Okay, Professor."  
  
--  
  
In the weeks leading up to Christmas, the other students began to avoid Harry. It was subtle, but unmistakable how students would take Neville over him as a partner in Potions, how the seats around him filled last, and how the Quidditch team members left him entirely to his own devices.  
  
It seemed that only Ron, Hermione, Seamus Finnigan and Dean Thomas remained in anything like a remotely normal mood around him.  
  
And when Christmas vacation rolled around, most of the students fled to their families and away from the unknown terrors of Hogwarts. Sirius, however, stayed, and Harry decided to remain there as well, hoping to get an opportunity to let his godfather appreciate the season.  
  
The collected Weasleys stayed at the castle, as well, due to their parents visiting relatives in Australia.  
  
And it seemed Neville was hesitant to return to his gran, leaving him in the Gryffindor Tower with the seven other children willing to brave the possibility of an attack over the break. And Christmas morning, Harry woke early to find his godfather and give him something to take the chill from the season.  
  
He found his way between the hallways, moving softly as if Miss Norris, Argus Filch's eldritch cat, would or could punish him for being up at 7 in the morning.  
  
But before he reached Remus'-and now just Sirius' living quarters, he ran into someone in the hall. There was a sharp curse, and then Harry recognized Draco, who was glaring at him.  
  
"It figures you'd be up this early, Potter," he snapped, pulling his cloak tightly around his slim frame, "when I'm trying to do something by myself." Harry didn't bother asking what Malfoy was doing; the other boy would most likely be as close-mouthed as his house-elf, although with less self-mutilation. However, this would give him an opportunity...  
  
"I was trying to find Sirius, but if you're up, I've got a present for you." Harry reached into his robes to remove the small box he'd wrapped the night before, even as he gripped the small pendant from the winter before.  
  
"You don't need to feel obligated," Draco began, but Harry just handed him a box wrapped in gold and green. The symbolism was not lost on Draco, who gave Harry a wry grin as he tore the paper away. Sitting in a black jewelry holder was a small silver dragon, intricately wrought and set with a tiny ruby. Draco glanced up at Harry, smirking.  
  
"You couldn't let yourself be outdone by a Malfoy, could you, Potter? This must have cost you quite a bit."  
  
Harry shrugged, not willing to let on what he'd gone through to get the trinket.  
  
"You surely know that I've gotten you something, as well. I thought that with your Mu-Muggle friend around, you might appreciate something like this." With a slight flick of his wrist, Draco seemingly summoned a small golden watch.  
  
"I've got a watch," Harry said.  
  
"I know that," Draco replied. "You don't have a wizard watch, though. I put Longbottom, Granger, and Weasley on there, so you'll always know what they're up to." And when Harry looked at the watch, it was indeed one of the common wizard's clocks, with each hand bearing a name and pointing to one of several different places: 'home', 'school', 'studying', 'do not disturb', 'traveling', 'in mortal peril', 'lost', 'in trouble', and 'hospital'. Ron was currently not to be disturbed, and Hermione was 'studying'. Harry snorted at that. And then...  
  
"I can't accept this."  
  
"What? Potter, this is a gift given in good faith-"  
  
"You're not on it." When Malfoy's mouth dropped open, Harry plowed forward. "I can't have this if some of my friends are missing." Draco's cheeks reddened slightly, and he suddenly grabbed the watch back.  
  
"Sure. If you absolutely insist, I'll have Mr. Temmains alter this at a --considerable-- expense." But although Draco sounded angry, he looked pleased. He brushed past Harry, and vanished down one of the halls that led to the Slythering dungeons.  
  
Harry grinned, and turned down the hallway to Sirius' room. He knocked on the door, and when Sirius muttered an assent, pushed the door open.  
  
Sirius was still in bed, half-covered (thankfully; Sirius had a tendency to sleep in the nude) with the dark red sheets, hugging one of the bed's pillows like a lifeline. Harry stopped by the side of the bed and removed his present to Sirius. Although Sirius had responded to the knock, he seemed intent on sleeping further, or might have been fully asleep anyway.  
  
Harry tugged the pillow away and replaced it with a gift he'd gotten from Peter years ago; the stuffed fox was charmed to ward away nightmares, and Harry was certain from signs of age that it was a relic from Peter's own childhood. And at the moment, he was sure Sirius needed it more. As he turned to leave, he noticed Sirius clutch the stuffed animal tightly, and heard his godfather give a contented sigh.  
  
"Merry Christmas, Sirius," Harry whispered, and slipped from the room.  
  
--  
  
When Harry started breakfast, the Hall was mostly empty. The only other person in it was Professor Trelawney, who started when she saw Harry. As he finished off his toast, though, she rose from her seat at the High Table to join him at his own seat. Her eyes blinked worriedly behind her overlarge glasses.  
  
"Mr. Potter," she whispered, "I have sensed you have been dabbling into the arts of the future of late, and I wonder if you are aware of the significance of what you are doing?"  
  
Harry looked up at her, into the slightly unfocused eyes of a woman accustomed to staring beyond the reaches of the present.  
  
"I...I am, Professor."  
  
"I trust, Harry, that you will be joining me next year in Divinations," she continued, "unless, of course, your journeys into the future bear no fruit. Tell me, Harry, what do you see?" She thrust her teacup at him, such that Harry could gaze into the bottom, where the leaves lay scattered in apparently random patterns. He stared at the shapes for a moment, seeing nothing in the murky cup bottom.  
  
And then something clicked.  
  
"You are a teacher, not a prophet. But you will play a part in greater things than this. You will show me things I will never see." He looked up into Professor Trelawney's eyes and smirked. "And you will come into money soon."  
  
The woman snorted and took Harry's own teacup. "Very funny, Mr. Potter. I seriously doubt my great-aunt has left some chest of treasures lying about my flat in Surrey." She peered at the bottom of his cup, frowning. "Now let's take a look at..." She suddenly broke off, the cup slipping from her grasp.  
  
"Tragedy will strike you again, Harry. You are stalked by the Grim, the specter of death! And, Harry...your path lies split by your choices. Choices of the head, choices of the heart, choices..." As she had spoken, Professor Trelawney's voice had deepened into something guttural and terrifying. And before she could finish, she froze, and fell forward onto the table, the cup rolling away from her with a rattle.  
  
"One never quite knows what will come from Sybill's mouth," Dumbledore said from behind Harry.  
  
"Wha-what did you hear?" Harry asked, trying to stand and wake Trelawney at the same time. "I just-Professor Trelawney asked me to...I didn't mean to make her..."  
  
"Professor Trelawney has a penchant for dramatics, Harry, and I suspect that this was one of her many attempts to draw awe for her talents. I must say your assessment is quite astute, however. I have seen skilled Seers pass from her classroom, though her predictions are usually no more true than your horoscope." Dumbledore bent over Trelawney and nudged her. "Sybill, it's time to get up."  
  
At Dumbledore's touch, Trelawney raised her head, blinking owlishly at the two.  
  
"Oh! Albus. I was just..."  
  
"No matter, Sybill. I just hope you'll get a good rest. And Harry, I think you might find one of your friends in the library."  
  
--  
  
Hermione had actually holed herself up in one of the more inaccessible corners of the library, having collected an ungodly number of books around her. Harry joked that she would someday get lost in there, and it was exactly why he kept a healthy distance from her whenever she was studying in there.  
  
Harry took a secluded table, and dug in his robes for something to do; he found the small notebook, wrapped in something like leather, or perhaps snakeskin. More rummaging revealed a quill, and Harry decided it might be a good time to start a journal. Maybe something to write down his predictions. He flipped the journal open, and was surprised to discover exactly what it was.  
  
It was a day planner.  
  
From the 1940's.  
  
And it was unused.  
  
Never one to waste writing space, however, Harry opened to the first page and wrote, "Today, Professor Trelawney asked me to read her teacup."  
  
As he wrote the words, they glowed, and when the sentence was finished, the letters faded into the paper. And then new words appeared on the paper.  
  
'Trelawney? I remember her; she was a skittish first-year who spent hours reading the horoscopes.'  
  
Harry froze, staring at the paper. Had it just...answered him? Trembling, he wrote a response.  
  
"She seems to know what she's doing; I think she sometimes might even be right."  
  
'And if I told you you'd go on a long journey, I might be right, too,' the words replied. 'But that doesn't make --me-- a Seer. And if she were, she ought to have seen what Reubus did at the beginning of the year. All she had to say, though, was how I'd become a real Slytherin by the end of the year.'  
  
Reubus? Something rang in Harry's memory.  
  
It had been 50 years since the attacks.  
  
"What are you talking about? Is this about the Chamber of Secrets?"  
  
'Of course! They hushed the whole thing up, but I knew what happened.'  
  
"Can you tell me?"  
  
'No. But I can show you.'  
  
--  
  
Harry wandered through the next few weeks, stunned by the knowledge of what Dumbledore knew and was doing nothing about. If Reubus Hagrid, known for his love of dangerous beasts, had opened the Chamber...  
  
Well, it was obvious he didn't intend anyone to get hurt, which probably was why he'd been allowed to remain around Hogwarts.  
  
And it made Harry worry; the voice whispering to him in the walls, even in some of his dreams, when he would wake with his mind reeling, implied a beast and wizard working in perfect concert. And Hagrid would never order something to kill anyone.  
  
And for someone so obviously of giant descent, he didn't make what one might call "pure-blooded".  
  
Hermione joined him at his bench during the first Herbology lesson after the holidays, when they were transplanting gorgon root, a volatile plant well-known among Muggles by its name for its most famous effects.  
  
"Harry, you've been out of it recently," she said, making sure her hands were fully covered before she uprooted the gorgon root. "What is going on? You know, Ron asked to study with me last night; he said you're not coherent anymore."  
  
"I just..." Harry shook his head. "I can't talk about it right now."  
  
His head shot up at the sound of a commotion. Neville hadn't securely fastened his gloves, and as a result, had let the gorgon root touch his skin.  
  
Madam Sprout shouted at him as she waded through students carrying a small bottle in one hand. "Move aside, everyone! If he doesn't get this mandrake potion soon, he'll have to go to the hospital wing for paralysis." She liberally poured the greenish potion over Neville's hand, muttering to herself. "I'm lucky I've got some out here, or we'd have to go to Severus for a stronger variety. He uses it to treat snake bites."  
  
Hermione's head snapped up. "What?" She lunged under the table for a book, and Harry could hear her flipping through the pages, showing little regard for the book's integrity. And then she was standing, one hand in the air.  
  
"Madam Sprout! I need to go to the library immediately!"  
  
"It can wait until after class, Miss Granger. I must tend to Mr. Longbottom." She tutted quietly, and then turned to the class. "Actually, we'll end class early. I should take Neville to the Infirmary. Please behave yourselves."  
  
Harry barely had time to turn to Hermione when she had gone, running towards the school building, followed by Madam Sprout, leading Neville at a swift walk.  
  
--  
  
Harry went to the Common Room with his journal, planning on quizzing the mind within it, a boy named Tom Riddle, about the Chamber. Maybe he could find it and stop the attacks before anything worse happened.  
  
"Do you know anything else about the Chamber?" Harry wrote, watching in fascination as the ink faded into nothingness and reformed into a new message.  
  
'No; I've told you what I know. It's somewhere near the dungeons, that's all I know. Where else would Slytherin put something like that?'  
  
"Harry, what are you doing with that?" Harry glanced up to meet Ginny's eyes. She was pale, and, he noticed, thinner than she'd been at the beginning of the holidays. "My father always said...don't trust something that thinks for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain." She took a few steps towards him. "And that's...not right, Harry. Because..." She stopped, shaking her head.  
  
"What is it, Ginny?" he demanded. She didn't move, instead staring beyond Harry. "Ginny?"  
  
"Mr. Potter?" Professor McGonagall was standing by the portrait hole, her lips tight. "You need to come with me."  
  
--  
  
Harry tried to ask what was wrong as McGonagall led him through the halls, but she remained silent; Harry could tell, however, that she was leading him unerringly towards the Hospital Wing.  
  
"Professor? Nothing's happened to Remus, has it?" She stopped short at the question, and bit her lip. "Professor?"  
  
"I think you'd just better come along, Potter," she said. When she started to move again, it was with a little more hesitation in it, which was why she didn't notice Draco until she ran into him. "Malfoy!"  
  
Draco was panting, clutching something small and shiny in his hands.  
  
"Professor," he gasped, and when he noticed Harry, he seemed to grow more upset. "Oh...you know, then," he said.  
  
"Know what?" Harry demanded.  
  
"Yes, and what are you doing, Mr. Malfoy?" McGonagall said, wavering somewhere between worried and stern. "I thought I'd told Severus to send everyone back to their dormitories."  
  
"You had," Draco said, his face approaching something similar to a sneer towards the teacher, "but when I heard what had happened...here, Harry." He handed over the small object, and Harry recognized the watch Draco had tried to give him for Christmas, with one addition to it. There was Draco's hand, pointing clearly at "In Trouble", Ron's and Neville's pointed at "School", and Hermione's...  
  
"What's happened to her?" Harry demanded.  
  
Hermione's hand was pointed at "In Mortal Peril".  
  
"Professor?"  
  
"We found Hermione near the library, Harry. She's been Petrified."  
  
--  
  
Hermione was essentially lying in state, eyes staring at the ceiling. One hand clasped a small mirror, and the other was clenched in a fist.  
  
"I don't suppose any of this means anything to you, does it, Harry?" McGonagall asked. Harry shook his head, numb as he looked at his friend, appearing as lifeless as Remus had. He reached out to brush her forehead, startled when it felt warm, instead of the cold stiffness he expected from the word.  
  
"No; she'd gone to the library. I...it was after Neville had gotten himself injured in Herbology. I can't say what she was thinking, but...Professor? Do we have any idea what this is? I..." Harry broke off, suddenly not sure if he should reveal what he knew about Hagrid and the strange, many-legged creature he'd released from the Chamber. "I want everyone to be all right."  
  
"So do I, Harry," she responded.  
  
It soon became apparent he couldn't do anything to help her, and so he drifted away from the Infirmary and back to Gryffindor Tower, where McGonagall had encouraged him to return. "With this attack," she'd said, "we're making sure no one is going to be in a situation where they're alone and in danger."  
  
Outside, Harry nearly ran into Draco. The other boy fell into step with him, and wrapped an arm around Harry's shoulders.  
  
"Harry, I can't say I've been very endeared of Granger, but I know she was your friend. And I'm telling you one last time to go home. Get away from this before you get yourself killed." Harry stopped moving, turning to grab ahold of Draco's arm.  
  
"You've been hinting and scheming all year, Malfoy. Tell me what the hell you know about all this!"  
  
"I don't know anything, Potter," Draco snapped. He pulled himself away from Harry, glaring. "My father doesn't trust me as far as I can throw him, and he hasn't told me anything. I just know that something's happening. My father was a Death Eater, damn it!"  
  
"And you've been pushing me all year, Malfoy." Harry pushed past him, growling. "I just want you to leave me alone."  
  
Harry stormed away from Draco, still feeling angry and terrified when he returned to Gryffindor Tower. He'd yelled at Draco, who he'd been trying to befriend. Malfoy knew something he wasn't telling Harry. Hermione was...  
  
Hermione had found something. Hermione had been attacked because she knew something. She'd found something out, and she'd been cornered.  
  
"Harry?" Harry looked up at Ron as his friend entered the Common Room from their dorm. "Harry, I think you need to see this. Our room-"  
  
Following at a jog he wasn't sure he could actually afford, feeling so distraught, Harry got up to his room, and stopped.  
  
Someone had torn the room to pieces. This person had focused especially around Harry's bed, leaving textbooks and notes scattered everywhere. His trunk had been upended, and sitting on top of his (mussed) sheets was 'The Book of Ages', open to some point in the middle. Harry stepped close, and bent over the book, too shocked to comment or even think about the chaos.  
  
The page was old, weathered, somehow appearing out of place. It should have looked like the other pages, but the paper was yellowed and crumbling.  
  
'She knew what he should have.'  
  
"Harry?"  
  
"Hermione...she's been Petrified, Ron." Harry turned to look at Ron, and swallowed. "And I know who's done it."  
  
"What? Who?"  
  
"It's Voldemort, Ron. He's been attacking the students."  
  
"What? Harry, how do you know that? How is he here? What-"  
  
"I don't know, Ron, but Hermione did."  
  
"Harry?"  
  
"I'm going to find him, Ron."  
  
--  
  
So, here we are. We all know what's going to be happening from here on out, but I hope you'll stick through to the end; I may yet be able to surprise you, eh? Until next time. 


End file.
